The following essay first appeared in my dissertation committee's inboxes in November 2008. It is a response to the rather open prompt of "write about boundaries in four medieval works." The footnotes are now properly linked back to where you were in the text. Enjoy, if you want; discuss, if you like.

Negotiating Time’s Boundaries: Identity, History, and Utopia in Four Medieval Works

Modern Westerners are by and large accustomed to think of time as a fixed process, flowing in one direction only, out of the past into the future. We experience this process as “the present,” a sense of “right now” against which the past is “behind” us and the future “before.” For the Middle Ages, one may broadly say that the same was true, with some reservations: the future is known—heaven or hell, and, after the apocalypse, New Jerusalem or hell—and the past is important first and foremost in light of that future. Both “sides” of the present, then, form boundaries around that present: the past has a purpose and should not be tampered with; the future will arrive in its time and should not be hurried along. While few works—outside Bede’s The Reckoning of Time and other philosophical treatises—deal directly with the nature of time, we may still see the boundary of history dealt with in particular moments in a variety of texts.¹ Four medieval works that contain temporal boundaries are Beowulf, The Book (or Travels) of John Mandeville, Pearl, and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The former two are concerned primarily with past and the latter two with the future. In Beowulf and Pearl, we see boundaries successfully guarded by those in power; in Mandeville and Malory, we see the boundaries transgressed by those with power. We can thus say that the boundary of time is thus also tied up with the boundaries of social identity and religion. In every instance, negotiating these boundaries allows us to see a utopian function emerge when the boundaries of time give way to a nascent, limitless hope.²

We begin with Anglo-Saxon literature, where the past is frequently depicted as mysterious, and that enigmatic nature is expressed in terms of sheer size. The remains, for example, of a settlement encountered in the poem “The Ruin” are called enta geworc, the “work of giants,” a judgment that simultaneously praises the majesty of the past while making it impossibly un-human and wondrous. If such wonders existed in the past, by the logic of that poem, they could not have been built by men. Something similar is at work in the past in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (~9^th-11^th c. CE). When Beowulf attempts to trespass on history, he is prevented from doing so by Hrothgar, who prefers a simpler memory of the past because it is easier to control.

The gigantic past appears in Beowulf in the sword-hilt with which Beowulf returns from his fight with Grendel’s mother. The hilt itself is all that remains; the rest, Beowulf tells Hrothgar, was burned away in the blood of the fiend (1666-1668). As Beowulf gives the hilt to Hrothgar, the narrator calls the artifact enta ærgeworc, the “ancient work of giants” (1679). Unlike those in “The Ruin,” however, these giants seem initially less than metaphoric:

Hrothgar maðelode--       hylt sceawode,
ealde lafe,       on ðæm wæs or written
fyrngewinnes,       syðþan flod ofsloh,
gifen geotende       giganta cyn,
frecne geferdon;       þæt wæs endelean
þurh wæteres wylm       Waldend sealed.
Swa wæs on ðæm scennum       sciran goldes
þurh runstafas       rihte gemearcod,
gesteed on gesæd,       hwam þæt sweord geworht,
irena cyst       ærest wære
wreoþenhilt ond wyrinfah. (1687-1698).

Hrothgar spoke; he examined the hilt, that relic of old times. It was engraved all over and showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord; the Almighty made the waters rise, drowned them in the deluge for retribution. In pure gold inlay on the sword-guards there were rune-markings correctly incised, stating an recording for whom the sword had been first made and ornamented with its scrollworked hilt. (Heaney 1687-1698).

This hilt records the slaying of the giants (giganta) yet itself is enta ærgeworc. If we believe along with the poet that the flood killed the kin of giants (flod ofsloh . . . giganta cyn), then there must have been a second race of giants, entas, who created the memorial to the passing of the first.³ In neither case is this the work of humans, but rather something larger than human. Theorist Susan Stewart identifies the gigantic as “infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural,” in opposition to the miniature as “closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural” (70). The gigantic points to humanity’s insignificance; it is our first experience of nature, of place (71). Giants moreover “are not the gods; they do not inhabit a transcendent space; they inhabit the earth, and it is their movement through the sensual world which gives shape and form to that world, if not meaning” (73-74). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gigantic for Stewart is also the realm of the sublime, as opposed to the miniature’s “orderly and cultivated nature of the picturesque” (75). Whatever the contemporary audience of Beowulf may have believed, the gigantic has more power in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a metaphor. Some of those figures, like the giganta cyn wiped out by the flood, are an older but failed nature, but the natural, the sublime giant, remains, filling us with wonder and dread. Such “natural giants” leave their wondrous remains, reminding the men who find them that the spaces we inhabit have a past, however mysterious or unknown.

Whatever the status of the entas who record the death of the gigantas, their relic remains in the text as a souvenir of a time and place, left behind after the battle with the Grendel-kin in the monster-mere. Stewart explains that the souvenir “distinguish experiences. We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather, we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of a narrative” (135). On the one hand, this is precisely the function the sword-hilt has in Beowulf. It elicits the report of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, and becomes the object that Beowulf proposes as the way the fight may be remembered. The engraving is also explicitly not about the fight Beowulf means it to commemorate; instead, relation to that battle must be allegorical, the destruction of Grendel-kind linked to the destruction of the giganta cyn, carried out by a Beowulf who must himself play this narrative’s vengeful God.⁴Any meaning, therefore, that the sword may have had for its original owner would now be lost, overwritten by Beowulf’s meaning.

In the creation of a souvenir, Beowulf undoes the past, denies that the hilt has any meaning beyond the one he gives it. Yet his attempt to propose the hilt as a souvenir of his deeds is denied by Hrothgar, whose advice to Beowulf that a good king spreads the wealth around (1748-1750) ends instead with praise for the bloody head of Grendel (1780). This trophy, and presumably also Grendel’s severed arm that already hangs on the roof (982-984), are the real signifiers of victory over Grendel-kind because they are unambiguously about slaying Grendel. Hrothgar prevents the hilt from being a souvenir because it is too unstable. It bears its own story, one that threatens to undo or at least complicate the story of the Beowulf-Grendelkin fight. Hrothgar preserves his people’s history, and his move makes that history unambiguous. In so doing, he rejects the “right” history, i.e. the Biblical history that the Beowulf-poet constantly wishes his story had possessed. Hrothgar’s decision to ignore the hilt is wise speech (wisa spræc, 1698) because it preserves, however temporarily, Danish identity, as well as the boundary between pagan history (the history of the moment) and Christian history (the history of the universe).

The boundary of the past has a different purpose in the mid 14^th-century work known as The Book (or Travels)of John Mandeville. This text seems at first as unlike Beowulf as one could find and still be in the Middle Ages: it is not an epic but a travelogue, it is explicitly and fervently Christian, and its narrator is far from being “eager for fame,” writing instead to lead pilgrims to Jerusalem and all the holy sites before and beyond it. What Mandeville and Beowulf do share is a sense of being haunted by the past. However, where the “true” past is rejected in Beowulf as being destabilizing for pagan society, it is embraced in Mandeville precisely for its destabilizing ability. Mandeville’s concern for Jerusalem and its environs borders on the obsessive, in part from a deep devotion but also because of the presence of the Other so irritating to Mandeville. In his prologue, the narrator grows increasingly rapturous about the Incarnation, which leads immediately for Mandeville to the land in which the Incarnation occurred: “Right ought men to love and worship and drede and serve such a lorde [Jesus] and worship and prayse such a holy londe that brought forth suche frute thorough the whych every man is saved” (2). Touched by the presence of the divine, Jerusalem becomes a place where devotion is the clearest, where the divine presence was felt once and may be again at last by those who truly belong there. “This is the londe hight to us in heritage,” Mandeville continues, “for the whiche every goode crysten man that may and hath wherof shulde strength hym for to conquer our right heritage and chase oute the ylke trowand” (2), which is to say the those infidels who presently occupy Jerusalem.⁵For Mandeville, “knowing the way to Jerusalem” can serve many purposes—curiosity, devotion, conquest—yet there is no reason all purposes may not be satisfied by going there.

Once he has arrived—after a very long journey involving numerous odd places and a meeting with the Sultan of Babylon—Mandeville finds himself in a city occupied by Saracens, strange people who seem to “trowe so nere oure feyth they are lyghtly converted whanne men preche the name of Iesu cryst,” but alas “understand not the letter gostly,” and thus remain in error (41-42).⁶ As tolerant as Mandeville seems toward Saracens, he is nevertheless eager to convert them—and this is precisely what he does when he arrives at Temple Mount.

When he approaches Temple Mount, or “temple domini” (22), Mandeville sees many things at once, including the Temple of Solomon, the destruction of the temple by the Roman general Titus, and the failed reconstruction under Julian the Apostate (22-23). What he does not see, however, are the Muslim buildings that would actually have been there, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, the absence of which is very telling for Mandeville’s point. When he gets to the top of the hill—which he alone of all non-Muslims may do because he bears the seal of the Sultan of Babylon (22)—he continues to see only the past: the Holy of Holies, and two “hutches” or niches; the first contains a stone from which apparently will run water, although it does not at present, while the second contains “a roche that men called somtyme Moriach but after it was called Belet or the hutche of god wythe the rylikes of Iewes” (24). All the relics of the Jews, from the Ark of the Covenant to Moses’ staff to the Aaronic vestments and breastplate, were once there, although Mandeville is not clear if they are there now or remain in Rome where Titus took them. Belet itself, or perhaps the rock within it, has a history as long as the tree of Jesse: it was the rock where Jacob slept, David prayed, Mary learned her psalms, Jesus was circumcised, and John the Baptist’s birth was announced (24-25). All these things Mandeville remembers as he stands in that place, yet few if any of those things were actually present on Temple Mount in Mandeville’s time. Mandeville rewrites the past onto the present: he converts the temple back into its holier form, in his mind if not in actual fact. Memory becomes a transgressive act, one that lets him cross the boundary of Saracen possession of the Holy Land and re-map it for Christian history.

Mandeville’s act is thus the one that the Beowulf poet wishes his pagans had taken, that is, of accepting their place in sacred history. Of course, both these notions of “past” are marked by Christian history intruding onto pagan boundaries, but this may not be as problematic as it first seems to modern readers. On the one hand, this move is to be expected, because Christianity is the supreme medieval ideological apparatus, and its truth is the Truth that always wins in medieval literature. On the other hand, it should be stressed that while ideological content is important, the process of crossing historical boundaries is more important, because it is where we might find the utopian function. Memory of the past in Mandeville can undo the present, acting as what Jeffrey Cohen calls a “temporal short circuit” that can allow the reader to see the past “erupt with the intensity of an unanticipated future” (7). What Mandeville anticipates from the past that he “sees” at Temple Mount is a Christian future uninterrupted by Saracen presence; what the Beowulf-poet anticipates—and what Hrothgar rejects—is that same Christian future, which within the poet’s logic could have saved so many Danes.

Anticipating the future and desiring it, however, are two very different things. As the past is a boundary which may be guarded to preserve identity or destroyed to create it, the future is a boundary that also marks community. In Pearl, a later 14^th-century English alliterative poem, the narrator, or dreamer, has a vision of a lost pearl that is both the precious stone and his recently deceased daughter. In his dream, he wanders among the woods until he arrives at a “crystal clyffe ful relusaunt . . . at þe fote þerof þer set a faunt, / a mayden of menske [grace], ful debonare” (159, 161-2), whom he recognizes as his daughter. Seeking to rejoin her, he proposes then to cross the stream that seprates them, but she rebuffs him, telling him that to cross this stream “þy corse in clot mot calder keve” (your course in colder clod must sink, 320)—no one may cross the stream while living. This stream is more than a boundary between the living and the dead; it is also a boundary between the uncertain present of life and the certain future of the life beyond.

The dreamer desires to enter heaven in order to rejoin his daughter, an attitude that the daughter in turn spends much of the poem attempting to remedy. The problem lies in the dreamer’s personal desire for reunion, not his desire for heaven itself. While either longing could be future-oriented, only one is a valid path to that future. Indeed, the dreamer’s personalized longing is problematic, which is why the daughter implores him to replace his doel-dystress (336) and þole (suffering, 344) with blysse (396) and mekenesse (406) if he should meet with her on the other side of the river. This didactic medicine exists not only to eventually erase the boundary but also to preserve its sanctity and meaning; if the living could pass into heaven without dying, what point would there be to life at all? The import of the daughter’s long dialogue with her father is that life must be lived, and lived well, in order to bring the future about.

The father, however, does not understand how his daughter, who was so young when she died (483), could have become a queen in heaven (473-474), a “payment” that seems unfair to him. She, after all, only lived for two years, and “cowþez [knew how to] neuer God nauþer plese ne pray, / Ne neuer nawþer Pater ne Crede” (484-485), so what might she have done to “fast forward” into her future glory? The daughter rebukes him, saying that while “in Godez ryche [kingdom] . . . is vch mon payed inliche [alike], / wheþer lyttel oþer much be hys rewarde” (601, 603-4), God takes all in their season (“of tyme of зere þe terme waz tyзt, / to labor vyne watz dere þe date,” 502-503). One cannot enter the future Jerusalem unless one is motelez (mote-less, i.e. spotless), which is a state only certifiably attained after one is dead (965-972)—and only through careful devotion while one is alive.⁷

This is not a lesson the dreamer learns easily, if at all. Faced in the end with a vision of paradise that matches the Revelation of John down to the appearance of the Lamb of God, the dreamer’s desire for that future overcomes him. Yet what matters most to him is not some anagogic return, but the all-too-human concern to see and touch his daughter again:

Þen saз I þer my lyttel quene . . .
Lorde, much of mirþe watz þat ho [she] made
Among her ferez [fellows] þat watz so quyt [white]!
Þat syзt me gart [began] to þink to wade
For luf-longing in gret delyt. (1147, 1149-1152).

The dreamer fails to learn blysse and mekenesse (or his proper place) and the boundary is enforced by God himself: “out of that caste I was bycalt: / hit watz not at my Princez paye” (1163-4). Here, as in Beowulf, the boundaries are guarded by the authority in order to preserve identity. Hrothgar stabilizes Danish history; the Prince/Lamb stabilizes heaven. Transgressions of these boundaries fail because the transgressors share a sense of wonder and desire that distracts them from the danger of their proposals. Beowulf is amazed by his ornate hilt, while the dreamer is amazed by the lapidary images of heavenly Jerusalem. Desire clouds judgment and leads to ill-thought-out plans to circumvent the boundaries of history.

We learn from Pearl, then, that, the process of “doing it right,” i.e. transgressing boundaries in such a way that they can bring about “good” futures, is that we need a plan. We see good planning enacted through Merlin in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a mid-15^th-century English prose romance. The figure of Merlin exists only for a short time in Malory, but he accomplishes much before he senses his impending doom (76) of being sealed under a rock (77). Indeed, his imprisonment highlights Merlin’s boundaries, for as a “dreme-reder” (12) he is bound by the future he has seen. Knowing what is best about that future, Merlin does all he can to ensure the correct future occurs through the creation of Arthur and the foundation of the Grail Quest.

The creation of Arthur is a fairly well-known story, in part thanks to the popularity of Malory in the modern age. Uther Pendragon, “seke for anger and for love of fayre Igrane,” duchess of Cornwall, is “done remedy” by Merlin on the condition that Uther “be sworne unto me to fulfille my desyre” (4, my emphasis). Thus, from the start, Merlin’s desire guides and controls Uther’s desire. Although both emotions are characterized by the word “desire,” it is clear that the meaning of the word in each case is different. Uther’s desire is his lust for Igrane, while Merlin’s desire is his bidding or will be done. Whatever happens next must be under Merlin’s control, and everything that Merlin does ensures that Arthur’s kingship will bind his community together. Once born, Arthur must be fostered in secret, and Merlin insists he receive the baby “uncristened,” presumably to avoid the paper trail that christening creates. Arthur’s secret fosterage, meanwhile, allows his later appearance to take on dimensions of wonder; to the people of his realm, he is an unknown boy whose ability to pass a mysterious challenge marks him as destined to lead, making his subsequent leadership all that more possible. It is Merlin who secures Uther’s word that Arthur will be king after him, and who convenes people to see the Sword in the Stone and Arthur’s achieving of it (8). After he has done all this, and Arthur has become king through his miraculous pulling of the sword, Malory announces that “within fewe yeres after, Arthur wan [won] alle the Northe, Scotland, and alle that were under their obeissaunce, also Walys. A part of it helde aynest Arthur, but he overcam hem al, as he dyd the remenaunt, thurgh the noble prowesse of hymself and his knyghtes of the Round Table” (10-11). Arthur’s existence and the strength of his kingdom are all stage-managed by Merlin, and come about not only through his “desire,” but also through a careful plan to carry that desire out. Merlin needs a unified England for one chief purpose, namely the achieving of the Holy Grail.

Merlin ensures that the Grail Quest will begin in a way that seems rather odd for a man who can appear and disappear at will: he arrives too late to stop Balyn from taking a cursed sword from a damsel, beheading the Lady of the Lake, and fleeing in exile from Arthur’s court (38-41). Merlin puts in an appearance only after this has occurred, and only then reveals that the lady with the sword was “the falsist demesell that lyveth,” and that Balyn “shall be destroyed thorow the swerde; for the which woll be grete damage” (42). But this late arrival is not accidental: Balyn has left the court and begun his adventure in time to slay in combat the knight Launceor of Ireland, causing in turn the suicide of Launceor’s paramour Columba (43). This act, Merlin reveals, is crucial, “because of the dethe of that lady thou [Balyn] shalt stryke a stroke most dolerous that ever man stroke, excepte the stroke of oure Lorde Iesu Cryste” (45). Balyn, then, is the source of the Dolorous Stroke, the wound from which King Pellam suffers for many years until Galahad achieves the Grail and heals him. Even by his absence, Merlin deliberately controls events. Knowing that the Grail must be achieved because of the great power it represents for all humanity, he creates the conditions necessary for its achievement, not only immediately, through Balyn’s mistake, but also generally, Arthur’s court being the kind that attracts the knights best capable of discovering and using the Grail. Unlike the Pearl poet, whose desire to cross boundaries is his undoing, Merlin creates boundaries in the present that ensure the future will occur as he desires.⁸

We learn through these works that boundaries in medieval texts are quite often meant to be transgressed. Every temporal boundary that exists, whether in the past or future, represents and ideological barrier: Hrothgar preserves Danish identity by ignoring Christian history; a Saracen future can be undone by uncovering a Christian past;⁹ the Lamb preserves the future space of heaven by limiting those who would try to get in early. The exception to this would seem to be Merlin, who is less the negotiator of cultural boundaries and more a “bounder,” so to speak, someone who creates that historical process, or perhaps stands for that process itself. In every case, however, the transgressive moment is the moment of what Ernst Bloch would call anticipatory illumination, that spark of consciousness that “drives world-figures, world-landscapes, without them being destroyed, to their entelechic limit” (II: 810). Alongside this runs docta spes (educated hope), which Bloch identifies as “the unfinished forward dream . . . a methodical organ for the New, an objective aggregate state of what is coming up” (I: 157, emphasis in original). The process of overstepping these boundaries, as well as the mere fact that we are told it may be possible to do so, is what is important for these texts. As Bloch reminds us from the start, “preceding societies and even many myths in them . . . may also provide a philosophy which has surmounted the bourgeois barrier of knowledge with possibly progressive inherited material, even though . . . this material particularly requires elucidation, critical aquisiton, functional change” (1: 9). The boundaries we saw in Beowulf, Mandeville, and Pearl are obstacles put in place to protect those in power; in every instance, here including Malory, overcoming those obstacles leads (or at least would lead, in Beowulf and Pearl) to moments that remind us of our own potential for transgression and the progressive hope that arises from doing so.

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Notes

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1 For an interesting and more philosophically nuanced meditation on the nature of time in the Middle Ages, see Jeffrey Cohen’s chapter “Time’s Machines” in Medieval Identity Machines, pp 1-34.

2 I deny the rumor this essay was paid for by the Obama campaign.

3 Here, perhaps, a distinction has been made between the native, traditional concept (ent) and the clearly Greek-derived term (gigant): the latter the giants of Genesis 6:4 (gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis), the former perhaps metaphorical or a known monstrous other. This is borne up somewhat by the fact that another mention of “gigantas” occurs in Beowulf at ln. 113, in the context of those races cursed by Abel’s murder. Moreover, Clark-Hall’s entry for gigant notes that it is found only in Beowulf and the Bickling Homilies (155), implying that this is a word with Christian overtones. Gigant, then, is the word for that race of Biblical human/divine hybrids; ent would seem to cover every other “gigantic” form that has existed in the earth since those days.

4 As Andy Orchard argues in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, this identification of Beowulf with God would be a bit problematic, since it is clear that he shares far more characteristics with the monsters he kills than with the divine.

5 Although “ylke trowand” would seem to mean something like “true believers,” or at least “same-believers,” it exists in apposition with a later statement that good Christians should “chalenge the heritage that oure fader left us and do it [Jerusalem] oute of straunge mens handis” (2). Perhaps Mandeville is thinking “ylke” to mean “those who still believe the same,” i.e. the Jews, of whom he is even less of a fan than he is Saracens.

6 This is not the place to fully explain the discourse of “Saracen” in the Middle Ages; suffice it to say that “Saracen” in Mandeville seems to mean “Muslim” in a far less hostile way than the word is often used. In this essay, I use “Saracen” where Mandeville participates in that discourse, and “Muslim” to refer to the actual Islamic people existing in the Middle Ages.

7 Compare this notion with the alliterative homily Cleanness, likely also by this poet, which makes this point largely through a discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah.

8 I recognize that the Merlin argument is a little compressed and slightly tangential to the overall point of the essay. At some point, probably not in the dissertation, I fully intend to flesh this argument out into a little article about the unstable nature of the Arthurian community in Malory.

9 One might even say that Mandeville uncovers a Jewish past, although he would likely deny this, given his exceptional anti-Semitism.

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Works Cited

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Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. 1959. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight, trans. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986.

Clark-Hall, J. R. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 1960. 4^th ed. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 14. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2004.

Finch, Casey. The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1993.

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Klaeber, Frederick. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 1922. 3^rd ed. Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath and Co., 1950.

Kohanski, Tamarah, ed. The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text with Commentary on the Defective Version. Tempe: Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2001.

Malory, Thomas. Works. 2^nd ed. Eugène Vinaver, ed. London: Oxford UP, 1971.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N. C.: Duke UP, 1984.

Comps Round One: Over

I have survived written comps, although I have yet to hear back from all of my committee. We do exams in two stages in my local English department: a 72-hour take-home written exam and, later, an oral defense of a 25-page paper and its attendant reading list.[1] I finished the first part of this journey at noon on the 7th of November.

My exam had three possible questions, from which I was to pick two and compose responses of close to 15 pages for each. My questions asked me to 1) trace the theme of boundaries through four of the six accompanying works (Beowulf, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Mandeville, The York CC Plays, and Le Morte Darthur), but was open-ended as to that theme's ultimate meaning; 2) Use four theorists from the reading list (two medievalists, two non-medievalists) to define "utopia," and then apply that to one or two medieval texts from the list; or 3) Give three Marxist readings of works and explain why they were useful and what harm they might do to the text. Note that these are parapharasings of the questions; if you're confused, I'll try to find what I did with the question sheet and post it here later (or not, if WAQ/MKB/DAJ say otherwise). I did the first two, not because I didn't want to do the third one but because I didn't have time to come up with three Marxist readings off the top of my head.

I may post the responses to these questions here at a later date, once I've heard back from all of my committee, and maybe given them another polishing. Brief summaries follow: Question 1 I answered by exploring Beowulf, Mandeville, Pearl, and Malory, and talked about the ways that each negotiated the boundaries of time; I used Jeffrey's first chapter in MIMs as a starting point for this discussion, and pointed to the Sword Hilt in Beowulf, the Temple Mount complex in Mandeville, the boundary between paradise and earth in Pearl, and . . . Merlin in Malory. I then added a utopian spin to this, which brought in some Bloch.

I answered the second using definitions from Bloch (again), Hilario Franco, Karma Lochrie, and Lyman Tower Sargent, and applied their composite definition (social dreaming with a push forward) to Chaucer's House of Fame, which is useful for a number of things. We'll see.

That done, I largely took the week off—as much as any of us can "take the week off." I spent it reading an abridgment of the 16th-century Chinese novel Water Margin, which is as far outside of my field as I could get without, say, going uncomfortably back into the realm of abstract mathematics and quantum physics.

Coming back this week to critical theory, I started to read Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual, which I'd heard about in Wan-Chuan Kao's presentation at SEMA ("The Object Biography of Whiteness: Affective Labor and the Color of Salvation in Pearl"). I understood Wan-Chuan's presentation well enough, but Massumi's book wasn't as clear as I would have liked. It seems to be about bodies, and the various states of being or sensation those bodies may posses, and the possibilities that these various states engender, and I have no problem with that on its own. Maybe it's the comps process, maybe it's my gearing up/focusing in toward the dissertation, but I've realized that there are some avenues of scholarship that I am just not interested in pursuing. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with those works, but I'm not up to the slog right now.

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NOTES:
[1] This is just for the PhD in English Literature requirement. The PhD in Comparative Literature apparently invovlves a wild series of exams and the Auto-da-Fé.

"St. Erkenwald is so hot right now": A SEMA Report

Well, I'm back from SEMA, and I had a pretty good time. There was a little mix-up about registration, which turned out to have been on the University end and not the conference end, and as a result, CEH and I get to have a nice chat with C-- A-- tomorrow or Tuesday about accounting for my presence at the conference. My paper went well, I think, although there was a bit of a debate with sharp-minded older gentleman who caught me out (rightly) in a bit of bad logic, which will be fixed in later versions of the paper; he also suggested another "economic debate" poem, which I'm hoping will turn out to be something really worth contrasting with W&W—i.e. it's too French, too late, too socioeconormative (who says late poststructuralist neologisms are dead?), etc.

Jeffrey's plenary was interesting, though I'll admit I didn't take that many notes; it was mostly cool just to see and hear him speak. He didn't sound quite like I'd imagined him when reading his work, but his voice does fit now: steady and quiet, yet persistent, and delighting in the wonder of discovering with you the awesomeness of the past.

Steven Kruger's plenary was more directly useful to me, though, because he talked about St. Erkenwald, a poem I'd been meditating on since I'd heard an interesting paper investigating its concerns with fame (and House of Fame) the day before. Steven also discussed different forms of conversion, and ways of reading "majoritarian" conversion (i.e. moving from a more secular to a more religious life within one's own faith community) as both like and unlike "minoritarian" conversion (e.g. of the Jews/Muslims/Mongols/Pagans/Heretics).

One curious thread uniting both these plenaries came not from their content but from Eileen's introduction of them. She described the work (and by implication, the lives) of both men as being "obsessed" with things: bodies (Jeffrey), queerness (Steven), time (both). Her use of "obsess," though, worries me, in part because obsession recalls to me compulsion as well, and with it the figure of not only, say, an Amadeus, but also a crazed, hoarding, untrustworthy person. Are we academics so far gone into our specialist cubbyholes that we can unselfconscioiusly refer to the work that we do as obsessing us, possessing us, causing us to give up our reason? I wholly doubt Eileen meant this, implying rather that both men find their own "red threads" that are persistent and fulfilling to discover, and perhaps, ironically, I have myself obsessed about obsession. Even so, it seemed slightly unheimlich at the time.

Other sessions were equally good: the session on Multimodal Teaching; the session in which CEH showed herself once more to be a fine scholar, and in which Lorraine Stock gave a cool paper on the afterlife of Geoffrey's Gomagog; the Chaucer panel in which I was forced to reconsider aesthetics, Sir Thopas, the role of Petrus Alfonsi in Chaucer, and my previous estimation of Carl Franks' work with Thomas Aquinas. Although I didn't get to hang out as much as I would have liked, it was nice to see people again, and to finally meet not only Steven Kruger and Jeffrey Cohen, but fellow blogger Karma, who actually made my afternoon by introducing herself to me.

I also got a mini walking tour of the surrounding area from St. Louis local and fellow SEMA-ite Lloyd (whose last name escapes me). I took lots of architecture pictures, many of which came out well and will soon be in their own album on my Facebook account.

For now, I'm tired, I have groceries to buy, books to read, papers to grade, and television to watch, probably in that order though no guarantees are made. For added fun, I'm coordinating the scoring of the Advanced Comp Exemption Exam this week, which means picking up the 400+ exams from the other end of campus, as well as spending three nights at campus until eight.

Another Book for the List

I woke up this morning to Jeffrey Cohen's post on the end of Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, and realized that what she says is kind of what I wanted to say in my dissertation (who needs coffee now?). I should preface this by saying that, as the title indicates, I have not yet read Dinshaw's book, and so this post is a reaction to Jeffery's post more than it is to Getting Medieval. The discovery that Dinshaw is demanding what I want to demand should not have been as surprising as it was; after all, medieval studies is a field in which the past constantly shocks the modern world. But nine years on, Dinshaw's call to use "the ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future" (206) seems from this end of the field like a project only barely begun. Perhaps it has led to to some very useful research and thought, but the full potential of this reading remains, well, potential.

And that's the problem. Literature, and the humanities as a whole, are not just a tool for academics to mumble on about things that should be done—communities, politics, lives expressed in the subjunctive. I know that neither Dinshaw nor anyone at In The Middle believes this, but I do think that is how the academic community tends to see the humanities: it is a field that does nothing but talk about potentials and becomings while having little to no effect on potentiality or actual change. If Althusser (my old standby) is still right, and the academy continues to exist in a position of power the ideological state apparatus, then we have a responsibility to do more than just "acknowledge" our status and "include" marginalized people within the apparatus. We have a responsibility to change how people think, in a way all people can understand, in a way that touches them directly. We may not be able to touch the past, but we can touch the present, and do more than "touch."

Based on what I've read at ITM this week, I would say that Dinshaw's message is an excellent start, but it needs revisiting (or visiting, in my case). I think—I hope—that a careful synthesis with utopian theory and a Marxist hermeneutics will help us discover not only how we can build those "selves and communities," but also why and to what end those selves and communities exist: to change the future, to make it a place without hunger, without exploitation, with, as we used to say (and believe when we said it), "liberty and justice for all."


NB: I like that ending, but I think the "synthesis with utopian theory and a Marxist hermeneutics" might need explaining. I believe this will be useful—despite all the problems that a late-Enlightenment rationalist philosophy has—because I believe that the only way to effect real material change is to believe in a real material world. I think the bridge between that and the ideological/ideal world is utopian theory, and thus I am in solidarity with Ernst Bloch's docta spes: hope, yes, but an educated hope, one that returns to the ground to show how what it saw in the sky can be used on the ground.

Edit: On rereading Jeffrey's post, I think the power of the adjective queer finally hit me: it's a gender-flavored version of the same politics I've been aiming for all along. If we queer the middle ages (borrowing Glenn Burger and Steven F Kruger's phrasing), we make it unheimlich enough that it becomes a critical position in discourse. In other words, queering makes the medieval (or any field) different in a way that lets us argue for (and even argue our way into) real change.

All this has made me more certain that my final chapter is going to be programmatic (without being dogmatic): after moving through numerous medieval texts, I'm going to talk about what those texts show us, and the possibilities they open up for us. To use an example some of you might hear me deliver at SEMA in a few weeks, the potential of Winner and Waster is that it shows a way that one class can "win" a major victory purely through language, leading to a restructuring of society in which everyone, from the king to the Winners, the Wasters, and even the poor, can be better off than they were before. It's not a perfect victory, but it's a good idea, and one we can build from and perhaps even try again.

And then this happened . . .

So, as noted at #4 in the last post, I'm reading A. C. Spearing's Textual Subjectivity, because I think it might be useful for The Dissertation, and I need something to do while my students are taking their Awesome Test. And I'm trucking along through the book, reading some intersting things about narrator theory and subjectivity, and then I hit this:

Modern readings of Chaucer in particular tend to focus on psychology and ideology, even when these obscure or explicitly deny the qualities that have made it a pleasure to read his work and have kept it alive over the centuries. One thing that emerges from a study of interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde and The Man of Law's Tale is that many recent scholars do not allow their judgments to be guided by the pleasure-giving power of Chaucer's poetry, and sometimes seem actively to resist and dislike it. I hope the present investigation will not lose touch entirely with the primitive and indispensable goal of pleasure (34).

My response to this is "so what?" While I do not deny that there might be pleasure in reading Troilus and Criseyde or Pearl or even Ancrine Riwle, the pleasure of reading would seem to have a rather limited place in textual criticism. Certainly you need to enjoy the text you're reading in order to endure it long enough to critique it, but pleasure itself is too subjective a response to be useful after that moment. Expressing one's like or dislike for a text then seems secondary to the goal of explaining something about what a text does and how it does that. We are, for the most part, no longer pure formalists, finding joy in the how of a text and never asking why a text might do what it does. Indeed, allowing one's "judgments to be guided by the pleasure-giving power of . . . poetry" might even be problematic: what happens when one finds pain, or discomfort, or that moment of outright unheimlich in the poetry? Do we turn away because it is no longer a source of joy? Rather, these are the moments on which we linger, the moments where we become confused or uncomfortable, the moments that demand the "why" of criticism. In this sense, an aesthetic judgment may be necessary, but it does not seem to be quite the "end all" that Spearing seems to suggest here.

I realize that this may be far from what Spearing was arguing in this passage, and of course I am not done with the book, but this gut-reaction reductio doesn't seem so absurd as it might. In any event, the question remains: why make this textual move here, where it seems so out of place?

I am also aware of the metatexual nature of this musing, in that a moment of textual weirdness in Spearing's work incited me to discourse—thereby demonstrating my point that perhaps we get more discourse out of the odd than out of the pleasurable. Derevaun seraun, as Joyce said, and the end of that is criticism.

Atemporal musings

I suppose I've fallen off everyone's blogroll, since I post so rarely, but I do keep up with what the neighbors are saying. Today, for instance, I read a fascinating post by Eileen Joy over at ITM. Responding to comments on medievalism made by Stephanie Trigg at this year's Leeds conference, Eileen implies that the false medievalism/medieval reality dichotomy leads us to believe that any presentism in our scholarship is medievalism and therefore not rigorous scholarship. This notion, in turn, blinds us to the force that our scholarship can (or at least should) have:

It seemed to me then [at the Leeds session] and now in our present moment when human [and other] rights are under terrible assault in a country--the United States--that calls itself an historical democracy and that supposedly believes in historical due processes of law, and which has no problem calling its enemies "medieval," that medieval studies has a great responsibility, indeed, and one that must never forget its location in the [troubling and troubled] present.

Remembering that schoarship is always-already presentist (or in our particular jargon, a "medievalism") leads her to argue that we can and should act "as if" our scholarship has meaning in a wider world—because it does:

I cannot see that we have any other choice but to proceed "as if" things could be better if only we were to believe they might be emended, recuperated, attended to, saved, ameliorated, healed, touched, moved, affected, changed, etc. by our labors--labors, moreover, rooted in a fierce attention to and regard for others, wherever they might be, past, present, or future.

This engages directly with the project of locating the utopian in medieval studies because, on the one hand, the "utopian medieval" is not a misnomer, despite the "Renaissanciness" of "utopian" (pardon the Colbertism)—something that I have argued here before and in my work on the discourse of the utopian medieval (coming soon to a oral defense near you me). On the other, it is a reminder that ultimately what matters in scholarship is the generation of new ideas, whether those are scientific, pedagogical, literary, historical, sociological, home economical, agricultural, or (for better or worse) mercatorial. Looking for past utopian traces allows us to reexamine our own present, and provides ways for us to imagine outward from the present moment.

If this is a medievalism, then so be it. It's a good medievalism. As Utah Phillips used to say of Amon Hennesy's song "I Will Not Obey,"

I told him, "Singing a song like that will get you into a lot of trouble."
"That's okay," he said. "It's good trouble."

It's good medievalism.

Long Time Gone

You know, things have been really busy this semester, and when they haven't been busy, I haven't wanted to blog. So, here's what's been going on:

I've been working on a project for MKB's Culture of Longing seminar (the book version of which will be coming to stores near you soon) in which I try to argue that Green Arrow is not a nostalgic reification of "the medieval," but is in fact a utopian re-appropration of not only medieval style but also medieval utopian energy. I deliberately used the word "try" there, because it's not quite working out the way I wanted; instead, the paper seems to want to go in several other directions that, while perhaps more agreeable to the goals of MKB's course, are not things I want to talk about either in my dissertation or at all.

I've also finalized my reading list; it's mostly cribbed from two sources: Bradley's Anglo-Saxon Poetry (though since I've put all of the back end of Cotton Vitellius A.xv on it, I'll probably have to get Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies as well); and Garbaty's Middle English Literature anthology (with the Riverside for Chaucer—I'm reading CT, TC, and HoF). The secondary readings include a lot of Marxist theory on utopias, like Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, Philip Wegner, and Louis Marin, as well as some key medieval critical texts, like Jeffrey Cohen, Michael Uebel, Sheila Delaney, and the Autumn 2006 issue of JMEMS. It should be an interesting summer.

Also, I will be going to Daytona this summer for the AP scoring sessions, so there's a week in June that's shot.

As of yet, I haven't applied to SEMA, though I will as soon as WAQ weighs in on the conference version of the Winner and Waster paper I did last fall. I'm kind of lost as to how things work with K'zoo; I won't be going this year, obviously, but I'd like to go the next. Any advice on how to do that, blogosphaeroids?

Finally, last week was CAC's NN^nd birthday; we went to a local arcade/family entertainment thingie to ride go-karts, play some skeeball, and win a lot of cheap prizes. Festivities included our friend JSJ riding the mechanical bull; the first two times were mildly funny, but the third is a classic example of hubris:



Catch that? He yells "I am the King of Riding Things," and is immediately dethroned for his pride.

So, that's me in a nutshell. What have you been doing, reader(s)?

Comments About Utopia

And I'm back. I've brought with me the current draft of my conclusion to the paper for discourse analysis; though it's rough, and may cause contention, I post it here to see if there's any reaction at all.

The goal of this project is to examine the use of "utopia" by a few medievalists. As I note in the essay, the articles I have examined here constitute a small selection of the work having been done on the utopian impulse in medieval cultural production. The articles are drawn from a recent (Fall 2006) edition of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMS), which was entirely devoted to “essays that consider utopian dreams dreamt before or beside More’s work [Utopia]” (Ingham 480). Of the six essays published in that issue, three were on explicitly medieval topics. Karma Lochrie’s “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages” works largely with the important (though late-antique) Commentarium in somnium Scipionis (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio) by Macrobius. William Burgwinkle traces idealized communities through several crusader-era texts in “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.” Daniel Birkholtz, in an essay titled “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint,” gives a close reading (quite literally!) of the mappamundi (world map) once found in Hereford Cathedral. I include as well Patricia Clare Ingham’s introductory article, “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia,” which sets the stage for the rest.

Taken as a whole, these essays represent the most recently available scholarly investigations of medieval utopia. I use “represent” deliberately: there have been many contributions to the scholarly conversation, as Ingham points out (480), and the present articles are but a small sample that may speak for a larger project. I have selected these essays for a number of reasons: they are all from the same journal, were written as part of a larger project, and are all in English. These, then, may not be all there is to know on the subject, but the knowledge they produce should be consistent and coherent, and can be compared with a minimal amount of suturing.

Please, if I mention you by name, and in the course of that mention say something you read as unfair, know that I don't intend you personally any harm. I'm just concerned about the state of utopian studies with a medieval bent, and I fear that a good number of people are not as vociferous as they might be.

Begin Conclusion:
We see, then, that “utopia” has a number of uses for these critics, some of which overlap and some do not. We are left with the question of whether there is such a thing as a “discourse of medieval utopia.” Recalling Foucault’s four stages of discursive formation—positivity, epistemoogization, scientificity, and formalization—what signs do these essays exhibit of having produced, become, or been produced under a science? What modes of inquiry do they produce? How do they produce knowledge of a “medieval utopian” kind?

First let us narrow down the possibilites for the state of the “medieval utopian,” using Focualt’s list as best we can. It seems clear enough that the discourse is positivized, for it has gained some independence from mainstream “utopian” thinking, has existed in some degree since at least the late 1970’s (though the part of the conversation in English has been more recent), and has enough recognition to have been made the special topic of a prestigious journal. The discursive formation seems also to be epistemic, since each critic “exercises a dominant function . . . over knowledge” (Foucault 186-7) in order to trace utopia in medieval cultural production. Can we call it a science, then? Perhaps: the discourse already has formal moves common across the articles: at some point, for example, each essay must come to terms with Thomas More’s Utopia and justify the ability to “circumvent” More chronologically. Some, like Lochrie appeal to “positive” and “negative” utopic functions—those that posit schemes for the future, and those that “foster and anticipatory consciousness” (509), respectively. Others, like Birkholz, propose heterotopias instead of utopias, or, like Burgwinkle, suggest that pre-More utopias are historical fantasies. In any case, this grappling with More would fit Foucault’s definition of “laws for the construction of propositions” (187): one must always justify one’s right to speak of the utopian as medieval, the right, as Lochrie phrased it, to “drag utopia back into the past” (494). So, then, it is a science, but it may be just past that threshold, since there is little evidence that the “medieval utopian” is “able, taking itself as a starting point, to deploy the formal edifice it constitutes” (Foucault 187). There would seem to be no “formal edifice” as such: a “science” that stresses its own paradoxical nature, that can be said to be both grounded (Lochrie, and to a lesser extent Birkholz) and rootless (Ingham, Burgwinkle), cannot have agreed on “formal” categories yet, nor may it be capable of “taking itself as a starting point.” We can say, then, with some degree of certainty, that there is an emerging “science” of the medieval utopian, one that still seeks an epistemic foothold, but has begun to generate propositions and eliminate alternatives.

Towards a Politics of Literature (Again)
Given that the science exists, what are we to make of what it says about the “medieval utopian”—that is, what are the propositions it espouses, and what are the ideological implications of those propositions? Common to each article is the notion of the utopian as a process that innovates, that cause us, in Ingham’s phrasing, to “reconfigure the familiar, to make us want it again in a new way” (488). This is a process that “begins in stupor and ends in wonder” (Lochrie 499), in which we “think we are constructing the new” where there is only the reworked past (Burgwinkle 540). These notions resonate with, on the one hand, Jameson’s statement that More’s own text “identifies those still-existing social spaces in which the new ideological values might be incarnated” (25) and, on the other hand, with Althusser’s notion that the ideological apparatus “may not only be the stake, but also the site of class struggle” (147, his italics). The theme of utopian as “innovative” not only allows critics to re-present the medieval as the site of class struggle, but it also opens up those texts to “colonization” by “modern” ideological constructions. Despite Birkholz’s observation that the medieval seems to be kept out of the utopian in order for the utopian to remain modern (591), it is very possible that in opening up the medieval through utopia, we are making it entirely part of the modern world and thus closing it off as a site of oppositional struggle. Yet this is, after all, a science still new, still wet behind the ears, and this is not to say the battle is lost.

Or is it? For another feature these articles share is their movement away from a direct political engagement with utopia. Both Ingham and Burgwinkle establish a reading of utopia as “paradoxical” which they leave unresolved, a move that leaves “utopia” as a free-floating signifier in Ingham (e.g. 485) and a figure of the eternal present in Burgwinkle (e.g. 553). Birkholz proposes in the end not utopia but heterotopia, a discursive formation that, as he admits “has its essence in difference, a taste for the multiple . . . [that] is effectively utopia’s opposite” (613), a bricolage of utopias that, like Birkholz’ definition of utopia, may itself be “unbuildable.” Even Lochrie “does not wish to suggest that medieval utopia can rescue our culture from its degraded sense of utopia” (445), although she does posit that the medieval utopia might foster a greater understanding of the utopian as “anticipatory consciousness” (509).

Thus, although medieval utopia carries with it the potential to establish ideological alternatives, to perhaps challenge ideology dialectically by returning it to a past made new, few medievalists have seemed willing to admit this. Although I cannot be sure, I suspect the reasons are largely ideological: consciously or no, a general trend exists in medieval studies to shy away from overtly political readings so as to preserve the integrity of ideological apparatuses. Recall that, for Althusser, the educational Ideological State Apparatus is the one that modern states most rely on for their ideological deployment and reproduction. For better or worse, that function can lie at the heart of any academic work: as “professional ideologists” (Althusser 155), our job is to reproduce the conditions of ideological production, to “treat consciousness with the respect, i.e. contempt, blackmail, and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of Morality, of Virtue, of ‘Transcendence,’ of the Nation, of France’s World Role, etc.” (156). The pessimism inherent in Althusser’s phrasing may not be surprising—he is, after all, a Marxist describing the bourgeois state—and it may well be deserved. The academic who reproduces the sort of knowledge that is needed for bourgeois ideology has done only what is necessary for their job: they need not go further. Presented with Utopia, the academy may embrace it, or it may reject it, or—worse luck—it may commodify it, making it ideologically neutral.

This should not be. Medieval studies has often been the site of ideological struggle: it has, at times, represented the best and worst of Europe’s past: now the hope of English Church, now the scourge of the “Enlightened” mind, now the shiniest beacon of the Romantics. Yet, as Allen Frantzen has noted of Anglo-Saxon studies, medievalism fell into a period of philological omphaloskepsis in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, in which it was resistant to theory and withdrew from the job of cultural critique and production. Although scholars of the High Middle Ages were the quickest to embrace literary theory and cultural studies, the field is still (even nearly two decades after Frantzen’s book) largely dominated by formalist tactics that do not, in the end, produce readings that matter. As Franzten argues, “it is the connectedness of Anglo-Saxon studies that matters, not their age”(226). One might say the same for medieval studies broadly: the field must be connected both to its multiple pasts and to its potential futures. This, then, should be the use of utopian studies: not just to say such-and-such is utopian, certainly not just to say such-and-such is the source of or analog to More’s book, but to say that these things can incite the utopian function today, here and now. Given the position of “the medieval” as a body of texts and artifacts that lie outside the sphere of the modern world—however much we discover the “origins” of that modern world in those sources—we should use that space as the ideological enclave that it represents.

I wish to stress that I am not accusing the particular authors of these studies of being apolitical; indeed, I know that several of them are politically strong, and that some branches of medieval studies are not only theoretically strong but engaged in the social here-and-now. But it doesn’t often seem that way, and the exciting thing about the science of “medieval utopia” its hope: the utopian function in medieval texts provides an opportunity to critique present structures of power through discourses that preceded—and perhaps even those that gave rise to—the “modern” age. Since “utopia” is a term that carries with it the potential for such a critique and such change, it seems a shame to be tentative about its use.
It is crucial when dealing with a theory that is still barely a science, still largely what Althusser would call descriptive (136), that we do not allow ourselves to fall into the old habits of the ideological state apparatus. The precise point of any utopian study should be not only discovering the status and function of utopian imagination at a given historical moment, but also, where possible, to re-energize the utopian potential. That is, faced with a moment of hope in the past, it is the duty of the critic to see that moment forward into he future. To do otherwise is to freeze hope into the past, to mark it as the “once was” instead of the “not yet.” Hope , it is said, springs eternal, but in order to spring at all it must not be held down.

References:

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. Monthly Review Press: New York, 1971. 127-183.

Birkholz, Daniel. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 585-618

Burgwinkle, William. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 539-560.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Press, 1972.

Frantzen, Allen. Desire For Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 480-492.

Lochrie, Karma, “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 493-516.

Project Updates

I've begun stabbing blindly at writing toward the Utopian survey project. In the course of this research, however, I turned up last Autumn's issue of the JMEMS, which was Karma Lochrie's special Utopian issue. There are a few good moments in that issue, and in Lochrie's essay especially but I haven't been impressed by the scholarship at all. Indeed, at the risk of being that wide-eyed idiot who dismisses things he doesn't like as "excessively bourgeois," I suspect that a lot of utopian scholarship either doesn't go into the HX sections of college libraries, or does but wanders out in a daze (I'll admit that the latter happens to me quite often, though the Ernst Bloch dazes are especially rhapsodic). In any case, a lot of what I've read so far has been fluffy scholarship, full of ifs and mights and lacking in a lot of common sense. Medievalists also seem keen to grapple with "utopianism-before-Utopia," as if More's libellum nugarum was some sort of foundational text along the lines of Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital. But it's not: it's the culmination of one tradition and the inception of another, less Also Spracht Zarathustra and more Le Morte Darthur. But I'll go into greater detail on this as we move through the semester.

I've done less work on my alliterative revival paper, though I do think I'll shoot for working with Pearl. Thankfully a recent article by Helen Barr, "Pearl—or 'The Jeweller's Tale,'" has explored a lot of the class issues inherent in Pearl; moving from that to "utopian visions for the emergent bourgeoisie" should be a snap. Whether it's a snap of the fingers or a snap of my neck we'll know soon enough.

Meanwhile, I've been served with jury duty sometime between the first of October and the end of December. I wouldn't mind it if it wasn't for the fact that they will not call me until a day or two before they want me, so I get to spend [n<90] days waiting for a phone call that will cause me to panic and reschedule, probably at the last minute and with some degree of pain toward my students.

Blog Is Not Lost

No, I haven't disappeared: it's just been a busy two weeks, is all. I'm back to teaching composition for the first time in a year, and it's both refreshing and frustrating. I have rather enjoyed teaching literature, being able to come in and just say "What is this about? How does it work? Does it even work at all?" and while one can do that with the composition courses, I also have to spend time explaining how they need to construct arguments and sentences: it's teaching two and a half liberal arts at once (dashes of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), and it's a bit of a drag. On the upside, the classes are smaller and the prep is easier, leaving more time for the insane class schedule I now find myself taking.

I've signed up for two seminars: one on Discourse Analysis and another on the Alliterative Revival. Both should be good, and both should generate material towards my dissertation. My current plan in the DA course is to build a chapter in which I examine (to borrow a Raymond Carver title) what medievalists talk about when they talk about utopia. So far I've got some Le Goff, a few articles in German, Spanish, and Italian, and (for better or worse) Michael Uebel's Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages. I'll plough through these and whatever else turns up, and with any luck produce something worthwhile and possibly part of an opening chapter.

The same holds true for the Alliterative Revival. Right now, the dissertation looks to be shaping up into an examination of dream-visions as sources of utopic energy, specifically how the middle ages imagined the city, the other, and the self. The AR paper will likely focus on Pearl, Langland, or something more obscure. In any case, I've had to put aside any plans for popular romance until another project.

Right now, I'm at that stage in a project where I'm excited to find out what's been said, but I'm afraid I'm not going to have anything to say myself. I'm also beginning to get burnt out on doing coursework, as I feel like having to take classes is sapping my ability to do my work. Is that normal for a second-year PhD, do you think?

In completely one-off news, I am now the proud owner of maps which show the world's landmasses as they will look when the oceans rise by 100m. Frankly, I can't wait to sail the Gulf of Louisiana or live on the island of Wales, just south of the Irish archipelago. Despite the loss of just about every major capital of the world—London, Washington, Rio, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, etc.—I can't help but think that these maps also show some hope: new oceans in the deserts, new kinds of politics, perhaps even entire nations cobbled from the seas (shades of China Miéville). Those maps are here, by the way.

Utopian Musings

Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good
that we come across from time to time in our lives can be
put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.
The kind of life that ours should have been.
— Nick Bostrom, "Letter from Utopia"

You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying,
like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming,
or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible.
That maybe you survive.
— Ninth Doctor, "The End of the World" (Doctor Who)

Sorry I've been out lately; work's got the best of my time, and what's left goes to, oh, old serials from Doctor Who, or having to call maintenance to vacuum out the water from my A/C on the hottest day of the year to date, or other little things. But I've been working, oh don't you think otherwise! Today was the second of three lecture/discussions on Paradise Lost, one of the many texts I've felt under-qualified to so much as attempt to teach. On Monday I was faced with lecturing on Donne, and discovered to my horror that Elegy 18 is not as innocent as I'd previously hoped (frankly, I always liked it for being clever, but several of my students pointed out that she has no say in what he demands, and is never really there at all other than as a thing to be possessed ["Oh my America! Oh my New Found Land!" etc.]) The week before was the Faerie Queene, which I'd like to think I handled all right. Overall, though, it's been a slog.

But I'm not here for confessional, your grace; I'm here toss out a dissertation idea. I want to deal with the medieval utopian. What is "utopia" in the middle ages, you ask? Well, I don't know yet, but when I do, I'll let you know. The scope of the project, though, is likely to include both elite (yay canon!) and popular (yay, er, this book) understandings, and may focus on dreams and dream-visions. If anyone out there knows of a good dream vision in, say, popular romance or a nice one-off chronicle, I'd be glad to know ye.

Meanwhile, I've been poking at the idea like a boy with a stick and a dead badger, and have begun generating the sort of philosophical musings that will probably—deus voluit and the creek don't rise—work their way into the first chapter.

No, you can't see them. What are you, some dead-badger-fetishist?

Oh, all right. Here, tell me what you think:

Writing on the Utopian in the European Middle Ages is dangerous, because there is a great temptation to conflate the Utopian impulse with Ecclesiastical notions of the millennium and have done with it. While the Millennium is an outgrowth of the Utopian, it is not solely one and the same. Rather than asking how they are alike, we might better consider the ways in which the anticipated Heavenly Jerusalem is not Utopian.
#
The particular fascination with the urban, built-form concrete Utopia is an early modern obsession, stemming from More's Utopia and (another text the name of which escapes me--JCL). The form "Utopian" thought took before this period—More's use of it in Utopia is no surprise—was metaphysical and theological; when it talked of cities at all, only Heavenly Jerusalem came up. Few would talk of building heavenly Jerusalem—such work was God's, not man's—and as such we expect few examples post-More to apply.
#
The question remains: what do we mean by the medieval Utopian? On the one hand, we can say, as Ernst Bloch does, that the Utopian represents a universal ideal of human freedom, an imaginary space where alternatives may be contemplated and hope for a new world nurtured. This level of definition seems however almost too encompassing: do we include as Utopian all sides of alterity, all moments of subversion, all instances of hope? The Carnivalesque, the queer, the millenarian, even the fundamental? "Yes" is the answer—yes, but not today. Not all at once.
#
As Nicola McDonald writes, “Modern narrative is often distinguished by the way in which it frustrates the conventional trajectory of desire, pulls it up short and resists the closure that is otherwise, in narrative terms, inevitable. Our desires, such narratives contend, are not finally satisfiable” (Pulp Fictions of Medieval England 13). It is no surprise that one modern descendant of romance is categorized as “fantasy”: those narratives in which it is even remotely possible for desire to be fulfilled must be separated from the vast, shambling herds of “real” fiction. We cannot hope for better than this life, in which, like Milton’s Satan, we have said “farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear / Farewell remorse” (Paradise Lost IV.108-9). Indeed, the world where all desires are known and met is often dismissed as a trivial place, not even worth experiencing—yet, as Fredric Jameson notes, “the complaint about the boredom of Utopias can much more clearly be seen to be so much propaganda for the excitement of market competition” (Jameson, Archaeologies 339).


There, that's the whole start of things. Nobody steal this or I'll. . . hurt you somehow.

I'll never abandon you, sweet blog of mine!

Don't worry, loyal fan(s), I'm not gone forever now that the "book club" is done. In fact, I'm still around, and thanks to a new part-time job, I'll be chained to a desk for about seven hours a week, so there will be plenty of time for me to screw around at the computer. It's a Mac, though, and it's running an ooooold version of Firefox, so I'm not too terribly sure what I'm doing. Fun!

The first few days have been pretty good. Lectures have gone smoothly, with me doing most of the talking—but I expected that, even planned it that way. It's much easier to get things done if I know where I'm going, and the less dead air (the usual response to questions in these parts) I have, the better I feel. So, lectures it is, even if it kills me.

The lectures, though, seem to be boring some people, to which all I can say is, "tough it out." One woman was even trimming her nails (what disrespect), which to me says, I'm not here to learn, I'm here for you to give me answers to things. Tch. Most of them, however, seem alert if not attentive, and one or two even ask clarification questions and respond when I ask them general-knowledge questions.

So far, the stuff hasn't been too bad: we did a few OE lyrics (The Wanderer, Bede's account of Cædmon's hymn, The Dream of the Rood) and now we're onto Beowulf. After that, there will be some more nation-building texts (selections from Anglo-Norman chronicles about the origins of the English), then Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Second Shepherd's Play, then an exam, then some Renaissance stuff I'll probably tell you about later, whoever you are you strange people. The goal for the whole course is twofold: explore the creation of the self (interority, alterity, etc.) alongside the creation of England as an idea (what does it mean to be English? To encounter things that are not English?) Hopefully it will give them some idea of the usefulness of literature. We'll see.

Summer Reading Reviews, Part 6:
The Arabs and Medieval Europe

Norman Daniel. The Arabs and Medieval Europe. New York: Longman, 1975. Pp. xiv, 378. Four illustrations. $44.00 cloth.

Although now more than twenty years old, much of Norman Daniel's 1975 work, The Arabs and Medieval Europe, still rings true. In this, Daniel argues for a new way of seeing history as fundamentally interconnected—we can no more talk of European history without Muslims than we can talk about Etruscan history without the Greeks or South African history without the Xhosa. Daniel begins his argument by selectively drawing parallels between the entire Arab world and Western Europe, especially England, in the 8^th century CE, demonstrating the degree to which both were similar in their philosophical, philological, and scientific endeavors. He then proposes to trace how "the two societies have gradually diverged" (22).

This he does, in a series of well-written and insightful chapters, starting with what might be considered a "fracture point": the sudden, though not unexpected, turn toward martyrdom as a form of protest in Cordoba in the 9^th century CE—an impetus that might best be recognized as the ideology behind religious suicide bombings[1] today. From here, Daniel turns to the wider Mediterranean, especially Sicily and Italy, before touching on the rise of the Recoquista in Spain, the impact of the crusades across the Mediterranean on both sides of the religious divide, and the rise of the Norman kingdom in Sicily toward its most tolerant peak in Frederick II. These discussions lead into an extended examination of the philosophical impact of such fields as courtly love, theology, natural philosophy, and medicine, most of which have been superseded by later, more focused studies.

Although hampered, perhaps, by its predating Said's Orientalism, as well as Daniel's forgivable, though unavoidable, biases toward Islam, The Arabs and Medieval Europe is largely quite useful. His investigation, for example, of the origins of troubadour and courtly love lyrics (101-105), ending in the surprisingly tentative conclusion that "there were certainly some parallel developments [between European and Islamic sources], and these were probably related" (105), seems mostly to be the skeleton on which the arguments of someone like Maria Rosa Menocal have been built. From time to time the evidence seems unconvincing—at one point he seems to base the existence of an Arabic-speaking Christian population in Spain purely on the fact that a number of Latin names "hide" Arabic meanings—but for what was groundbreaking research on a sensitive and largely cloaked topic, this is not out of the question. Still, the heavy bias toward Islam, perhaps rhetorically necessary when this book was first published, is largely regrettable today, since it undercuts the idea that world history of the period between 412 and 1483 CE is unbalanced in favor of Europe. One does not re-balance the scales by throwing everything on the lighter pan. Instead, what must be done is to see that period of history for what it was: a time in which Europe, far from the Enlightenment portrait of the "Middle Ages," was an active member of a vibrant, yet violent, pan-Mediterranean culture, sometimes Muslim, sometimes Christian, yet always, always, looking East.

_____
[1] Not necessarily Muslim suicide bombings; one could easily apply the same standards to IRA bombings in the 1980s.

Summer Reading Reviews, Part 5:
Europe and the Mystique of Islam

Maxime Rodinson. Europe and the Mystique of Islam. 1980. Tr. Roger Venius. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. Pp xv, 163. Paper, $26.95.

Maxime Rodinson's Europe and the Mystique of Islam is a work in two parts. The first is an examination of the origins of Orientalism, especially the medieval fascination with and fear of their Muslim neighbors. The second is a call to change in Oriental studies. Both parts evoke and enter into a dialog with Said's Orientalism, and overall, by taking a longer historical view, Rodinson improves on Said's classic investigation, especially in Orientalism's origins with and applications for the medieval. Rodinson notes that "the image of Islam was not drawn simply from the crusades, as some have maintained, but rather from the Latin Christian world's gradually developing ideological unity" (7). He traces various contacts between the Muslim and Christian worlds, then argues that a gradual change from fear to fascination came about in the West's perception of Islam, derived from "the increase in factual information about Islam and the Muslim world, the steady growth of actual contacts through both political and commercial relations, and even the mutual respect that was the occasional result of these experiences" (24). He also roots some notions of tolerance in the encounter with the Mongols, another, even less Christian people beyond Islam. Thus, in the mid-13^th century, "the feeling that Islam shared the same basic concept of religious monotheism with Christianity was reinforced; it was a notion that recurred earlier only fleetingly" (28-9).

Rodinson argues that the eventual shift away from European intolerance toward the Muslim resulted in a gradual rise in the interest for "the Orient" as a thing to be studied. This in turn led to the rise of Orientalism, which in seeking to understand or quantify Muslim behavior, slowly dehumanized its object of study. In a certain sense, then, this relativism is unfortunate, for it led to the idea that the studied may be controlled—and thus to imperialism. So it goes.

One gets the sense, watching Rodinson sift through the differing western interpretations of Islam, that "the Orient," or indeed "Islam," changes depending on who is looking at it; much like Terry Eagleton's discussion of "the aesthetic" as a discreet category, "all that is solid melts into air," and we are left to face the idea that any human creation is constantly being recreated. This is an unexpected moment of Post-structuralist navel-gazing, but not surprising for a book originally written in the late 70's in France. What such a notion—"The Orient" is a flexible category—tells us is that the Orient is never a thing in itself, but a speculum societatis, no more real than yet just as polemical as Tacitius' Germans or Harriot's Virginians.

Unfortunately, the majority of these moments occur in the first half of the book; the second half of the book is interesting largely to professional Orientalists, and may in fact be out-of-date in some areas; after all, the call to action he provides is a quarter-century old, and surely in a field that contains such critics as Maria Rosa Menocal, some work has been done toward change.

Summer Reading Reviews, Part 3:
Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach

Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival, with Titurel and the Love-Lyrics. Cyril Edwards, tr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. xxxiii, 329. 1 chart, 7 illustrations. £50.00.

God bless Wolfram von Eschenbach for being so weird. I'll talk about his particular Saracen-weirdness in a minute (and see previous post for my justification of the word "Saracen"), but for now let me say that this is by far one of the most readable and entertaining romances I've ever come across. Like Chretien before him, he's obsessed with details: how people look, what they're dressed in, how their horses look, what their horses are dressed in, the color of the damn grass even—it's all there. To give you one example, Gahmuret, Parzival's father, constantly looks like a million marks, kitted out in ermine and those damn anchors. Nor is clothing Wolfram's only poetic vice, as he is fond of multilingual puns, strange phrasing like "God was in a sweet mood for breeding when he wrought Parzival" (48), and one of my favorite episodes ever, the fight between Gawan and. . . a lion:

er hetem den schilt nâch genomn:
sîn êrster grif was alsô komn,
durch den schilt mit al den klân.
von tiere ist selten ê getân
sîn grif durch solhe herte.
Gâwân sich zuckes werte:
ein bein hin ab er im swanc.
der lewe ûf drîen füezen spranc:
Ime schilde beleip der vierde fuoz. (f. 571-2)

The lion had almost succeeded in taking the shield from him. Its first lunge had gone through the shield, along with all its claws. Seldom before has a beast clawed with such force! Gawan prevented it from snatching his shield. He hewed one leg off it! The lion leapt about on three feet, the fourth foot stuck in the shield.

See what I mean? I can only imagine Gawan yelling "getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!" while flailing wildly at it with the sword. It's not heroic, but I grew up with Monty Python.[1]

You can also see here how readable Cyril Edwards' translation is. It's modern, but it retains Wolfram's diction pretty well. The Boydell and Brewer edition is, as one might expect from that publishing arm, a fine one indeed. The introduction is focused but explanatory, and seems aimed for the general educated reader—exactly the sort of person who might have need of the book in the first place. Edwards includes many footnotes—a convenience often overlooked or, as in the Oxford edition of the same translation, relegated to far-less-accessible footnotes—and while it seems in places a few more might be useful, one sees why they might have been life out. The critical material, including a short explication of the illustrations in the Munich manuscript, is also well done. The only downside I see is that common to many of Boydell and Brewers' editions: a lack of a bibliography, with the result that one has to comb footnotes to find a citation.

Saracen Decorations

Save for Gahmuret's episode in the holy land/Outremer/Over There, the Orient shows up mostly as "Saracenerie," moveable goods from the luxurious East, and the standard furs, gems, and silk. It's everywhere in Parzival, from the one-off ruby to the ever-present Syrian silk to the gold braidwork on the Fisher-king's robes. "Arab," "Moor," "Saracen": these are just color-words for Wolfram—pun slightly intended, for while he primarily uses them as one-off references or flavorful adjectives attached to consumer goods (Moorish horses, Arabian silk, etc), he does of course "color" the Moors/Arabs black. Yet unlike many of his fellow epic-romance writers, Wolfram spends little time attributing to that color any significance other than wonder: the Moors are black, so it seems, because the spectacle of a literally half-black, half-white half brother for Parzival is just too good to pass up. One gets the impression that they do not function as allegorically for Wolfram as they do for, say, "Turold" or the compositor of El Cid, in part because when Wolfram wishes to be allegorically nasty, he is.

Witness the sorceress Cundrie (100 ffl), whose monstrosity is evident from the start. She is marked as other both physically, through the use of animal-derived signifiers such as bristles and tusks, and mentally, though her learning. For, as Wolfram tells us, "she spoke all languages well: Latin, heathen and French. She had a cultivated mind, encompassing dialectic and geometry: known to her, too, were the skills of astronomy" (100). This catalog seems to be as monstrous an indicator as her tusks, yet it is less so because of what she knows than the fact that she knows it at all. However, I know less than nothing about the expectations of women's education in medieval Germany, much less the education of sorceresses, and so can't be sure to what degree such erudition is normal for Wolfram's audience. I suspect it isn't quite normal, because Wolfram takes the time to single it out. The point is: some things in Wolfram might be monstrous, but Saracens aren't, and that alone makes him interesting.

Cundrie is not alone: she and her brother Malcreature [2] were sent to the Fisher-king by Queen Secundille, wife of Feirefiz, Parzival's half-brother and ruler of all of Tribalibot (aka India). This gift is interesting, because it sets up a reciprocal relationship between heathenesse and the Grail: the Fisher-king sends gifts to her in response, and both are pleased. But this makes little sense, for as we are told later, no pagan can see the Grail or, presumably, use it to gain its riches. Of what use is the pagan connection to the holiest of Christian relics?

The Saracens have interesting connections to the entire legend. Wolfram, admitting to his audience that Chretien's narrative is defective, invents a bard named Kyot, who "found in Toledo, lying neglected, in heathen script, this adventure's fundament. The a b c of those characters he must have learned before hand, without the art of necromancy" (145). As Cervantes would do some four centuries later, Wolfram imagines the Orient as a place of secret knowledge as well. In the latter's case, however, the knowledge isn't just a story, but the "Truth" of Christianity, written down in "heathen script," which can presumably be read by "heathens." The knowledge they possess is, like possessing the Grail itself, useless to them. One suspects that beneath his relatively benevolent position, Wolfram is suggesting that the heathens are sinister, keeping truth from not only themselves but all of Christendom as well, just for spite.

Or perhaps it is this: we are told many times that no-one can take the Grail by force, but must be summoned to it (250). Yet the Grail calls to Christian and heathen alike, and does not distinguish. Wolfram's portrait of Christianity is nicely universalizing, even if disturbing in its treatment of the heathen, who is all too willing to let go of "Jupiter and Juno" in the face of Christian "truth." [3] We may praise Wolfram for letting the Saracens off so easily, but we should remember that his is the most distorted view of Islam yet (of the three I've read, that is): unlike the Spanish Saracens in Roland, Parzival's pagans don't even name-drop Mohammed. Again, Wolfram understands the Orient as a source of wealth and the location of earthly paradise, but he displays even less knowledge of the east than John Mandeville.
_____
[1] Which reminds me, while we're on the subject of Python and Germans: I watched the Staatsoper Stuttgarts rendition of Das Rheingeld a few days ago, and couldn't finish it, primarily because the guy who sang Wotan did so out of the side of his mouth like Terry Jones (albeit Terry Jones with eczema, poor guy).
[2] Wolfram has hit the bottom of the name bag now.
[3] In typical knightly fashion, Feirefiz is won over to Christianity by the radiant beauty of the Grail-maiden, and not out of any desire to see the Grail as such.

Summer Reading Reviews, Part 2:
La chanson de Roland

Note to the reader: This review is in three parts: the first is an exercise in writing an academic review (here to keep the punters happy), the second is a reaction to the text itself, and the third is a list of questions I’ve yet to fully ponder that arise from the text. If you’re interested in my reactions, skip to the part so labeled. -- Ed

Review

Brault, Gerard. La Chanson de Roland: Oxford Text and English Translation. Student Edition. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1984. Pp. xxxiii; 245. $15.00.

A student edition of a larger work is often necessary, since we expect our students to be less interested in the sorts of minutiae that we tedious academics get lost in. Yet a student edition must be helpful and useful to the students’ understanding of the text, and that goal is in Gerard Brault’s 1984 edition of the Chanson de Roland, occasionally lacking. On the one hand, the introduction seems largely useful, helping to distinguish all the cultural and genere forms that produced this text. He moves quickly through the kinds of narrative poetry that France produced in the High Middle Ages to the “Historical Event” of Charlemagne’s disastrous campaign into Andalusia in the late eighth century. From there he discusses the development of the legend, then of the chanson itself, before analyzing its usefulness as an historical document. All this is done in a clear and concise prose style that would seem to work quite well for the general undergraduate reader.

There are, however, flaws in this introduction, as well as in the edition itself. These are in some places stylistic issues and in others questionable choices about what and how certain information is presented. He cites, for instance, Schliemann excavating at Troy as a reason to give some credence to the poem’s historical relevance (xix); not only is this an old chestnut, but it is not a very meaty one at that (Schliemann’s methods were not the best, nor was his poly-chronic reconstruction of “Troy” the Homeric city). Too, he occasionally lapses into strange idiom, such as the puzzling notion that “as in contemporary society, individuals in this epic are also bound together by feudal ties involving mutual obligations between lord and vassal” (xx). Unless Brault has been living in an alternative France, one can only assume he means “contemporary to the poem,” or perhaps to AD 778, something that in any case is not clear from the context. While later usage seems to indicate the former meaning, such imprecision in the introduction does not bode well for the translation ahead.

Perhaps most annoying is the lack of an apparatus criticus and footnotes, both crucial features for understanding a poem no matter what one’s academic standing. Taken in conjunction with his abbreviated bibliography of works largely in French, and his quasi-literal translation of the poem, one is not certain for what sort of “students” Brault expects this volume to be useful. French majors are presented with a ready-made trot; literature majors are not presented with a very literary rendition of the text; and the majority of today’s undergraduates, lacking a guide to the meaning of the text, will see the poem as just another incomprehensible relic of the middle ages.

Reactions to the text

The ideological machine that this text contains is centered largely on the dehumanization of the Saracen. I use “Saracen” deliberately here, since it contains the European idealization of the Muslim other. (Note: I’m almost certain I’m not the first person to say this, and if I’ve not given credit for this idea it’s because I can’t remember where I’ve read it). The Saracen in this text is dehumanized in a number of ways, some subtle, some less than that.

An example of the more subtle dehumanization occurs in brief moments such as this: Oliver, Roland’s companion, [1] looks out over the field of battle and says:

Jo ai veüt les Sarrazins d’Espaigne,
Cuverz en sunt li val e les muntaignes
E li lariz e trestutes les plaignes.
Granz sunt les oz de cele gent estrange (laisse 84)

I have seen the Saracens from Spain; the valleys and mountains are covered with them, the hillsides, too, and all the plains. The armies of that foreign people are huge.

The Saracen other becomes a blight on the land, like a plague of locusts.

In another sense, they are a blight since they are comprised of things that are always “almost knights,” people who ben resemblet barun (look a good deal like a true knight, laisse 229). They follow the same martial culture as Charles and his men, but they cannot be true knights, quite likely because they employ monsters:

De Micenes as chefs gros:
Sur les eschines qu’il unt en mi les dos
Cil sunt seiet sensement cume porc (laisse 232)

Of large-headed men from Misnes: on their spines, along their backs, they have bristles like pigs.

This detail, coming at the start of a list of the different nations that make the Saracen army, throws suspicion on all the “normal” people who follow in the list, not only those ki uncles ben ne volt (never wished to do good, laisse 232) but monstrous races as well. This highlights something about monsters that I’d not considered before: the Monstrous Races are always objectified. At no time does anyone expect a man to live, work, worship, or fight alongside monsters, for there is always the chance that you yourself will become one by proximity. Furthermore, no monster ever speaks nor has it own agency; those that speak at all, e.g. the Donestre, do so in the voices of others.

I’m reminded, too, of an essay by Greta Austin, in which she points out that the line between nation and race is paper-thin in the middle ages, and the line between race and monster is equally porous. [2] One could easily collapse the categories depending on polemical need, and thus it seems almost anticlimactic to discover that some of the members of the Saracen army aren’t human; after all, to the medieval European eye, nothing from the Orient was ever really human.

The Saracen is also marked by conspicuous wealth. From the start, they may not have a good army, but they can bribe Charlemagne with:

curs e leons e chens
set cenz camelz e mil hosturs muërs
d’or e d’argent iiiiC muls cargez
cinquant carre qu’en sent carier (laisse 3)

bears, lions, dogs, seven hundred camels laden with gold and silver, and fifty carts for a wagon train.

Ironicallly, Blancandrin, the speaker and “one of the most cunning pagans” (de plus saives paiens, laisse 3) next says that with such a bribe, Charlemagne “will be able to pay his soldiers well” (ben en purrat luër ses soldeiers, laisse 3). One wonders why King Marsile of Saragossa hasn’t bought his own army with such a treasure-hoard, or indeed why he should in effect become paymaster of the Christian army. The obvious answer—because God wills it—is not enough. Rather, I think it has much to do with the idea that Muslims are Orientals and therefore rich and stupid. Something in me also suspects that this is a post-Crusades mentality; while the Andalusian Caliphate was rich, I think, to borrow Professor Tolkien’s famous phrasing, “the tale grew in the telling.” After the mentality arose that one could go East and seek one’s fortune along with penance, I suspect it became much more common to assume that the Oriental would be a source of wealth for the Occidental. However, this is mere assumption, and I haven’t a thing to back it up with yet.

There is, however, this: the Saracens in this poem are an often indirect source of European wealth. Consider Roland’s “oliphant,” the elephant-tusk horn he carries with him. There being precious few oliphants in Europe since the last Ice Age, how else might he have gotten it but from Saracen traders? It is a surprisingly Oriental signifier in the midst of all this anti-Oriental luxuria.

Indeed, the portrait of the Franks is at times as disturbing as that of the Saracens. Their motives are typically rather thin; Ganelon, for instance, displaces the impetus for conquest off of Charlemagne and onto Roland: it is Roland who because “he holds sway over the Emepeor himself / will conquer for [Charlemagne] all the lands from here to the Orient” (l’emperere meïsmes ad tut a sun talent / cunquerrat li les teres d’ice qu’en Orient, laisse 30). No other reason is given for conquest—the famous “pagans are wrong and Christians are right” must wait until the battle begins, some 600 lines from this point—and one is led to assume, as Blancandrin says here, that “Roland is a maniac” (mult est pesmes Rollant, laisse 30).

The Franks also have curious rituals surrounding death: The cultural anthropologist in me is more interested in the death ritual that Roland performs (laisse 174) including the choice of a pine tree, placing his valuable weapons beneath him, turning his face to the enemy, and—most curious of all—pur ses pecchez, we are told, Deu en puroffrid lo guant (he offered his gauntlet to God for his sins), as if he is pledging his service to God in the afterlife. It all seems quaintly Germanic: dying under a tree, showing no fear, soldiering for God when you’re dead. I’m reminded most of all that I need to pick up James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity. To make matters stranger, after the Franks cut out Roland, Turpin, and Oliver’s hearts and set them in a casket while wrapping the bodies in stags’ skins (ritual!), the pagans arrive, and in a rather disturbing scene of re-arming, all the regions of the Carolingian empire are mentioned, as if this were a 12^th-century rendition of Triumph of Will: each region is strong, proud, and unafraid of battle (laisses 218-225)

In the end, neither portrait really matters, since the end result of this conquest is rabid anti-Semitic fantasy, as “idols” are smashed in Saragossa:

A mil Franceis funt ben cercer la vile
Les signagoges e les mahumeries
A maliz de ser e a cuignes qu’il tindrent
Fruissent les ymagenes trestutes les ydles
N’i remendrat ne sorz ne falserie (laisse 266)

Orders are given for a thousand Frenchmen to search the city, the synagogues and the mosques; holding iron hammers and axes, they smash the statues and all the idols. No sorcery or false cult will remain there.

The point here being that of course this did not happen: Saragossa was steadfastly Muslim until well into El Cid’s day.

I’m leaving out a lot, I know—battle scenes, the quick and surprising conversion of Bramimonde—but these are some of the weird images I’ll take away from the text, along with a general idea that, although we are supposed to believe the Christians are right, neither side comes out very well in the telling.

Notes

[1] I have an idea that “companion” here might have something to do with Alan Bray’s notion of the “friend” (see The Friend), but swive me if I can see anywhere to run with this idea.

[2] Greta Austin "Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races? Race and the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East.” Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds. Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations. Kalamazoo: U of Michigan Press, 2002. 25–51.

Questions

• How demonized were the “Saracens” in heroic literature before the Crusades?
• What else—besides the ambiguous wascones in the Carolingian chronicles—did the “universal enemy” of Saracen replace?
• Is the choice of “Saracen” as enemy a deliberate (or “accidental”) internationalizing of the story from something only locals would know to something all who read it would understand as “other”?
• Is Roland more of a hero fighting Saracens than if he were fighting “Wascones”?
• How did later ages in France treat the Carolingians?
• Is it even worth being surprised anymore that the luxurious and effeminate Saracens also use as soldiers monsters from farthest Ethiopia (laisse 143 ffl)?
• What’s with the beard fetishism in medieval heroic texts? El Cid grows his out, Charles exposes his beard to show he’s unafraid (so does the pagan king)—what gives? Weird masculinity signifiers?