Chaucer and the Animated Book

As I gear up for the New Chaucer Society's convention in Reykjavik next month, I've found myself thinking back rather fondly to my time spent in Portland nearly two years ago. And as I slowly transition back into some semblance of a work life after giving birth to my little one, I'm also thinking quite a bit about my projects (both current and future). I'm spending the month of June trying to wrap up a few smaller ones (my article on Middle English Mongols, an encyclopedia entry on Crusades Literature, and, of course, my paper on Ice for the NCS conference), but come August I'll resume work on my book project, Imagining the Crusades in Late Medieval England, in earnest. I hope to have a completed manuscript ready for interested publishers sooner rather than later (later being Spring 2015), and as a result I'm starting to think about what kind of project I'd like to create for myself after I send the manuscript off and away.

Over the past couple of years, I've presented on an array of topics not devoted to "things Crusades-related" in hopes of figuring out what my next project should be. I love my current work on the Crusades, but I have a feeling that by the time this book project is completed I'll be itching for the chance to branch out into newness. For a time, I thought about writing a book on the poetics of grief in Late Middle English literature. Presenting on Pearl last year at Kalamazoo, however, made me rather aware (as I expressed in a related blog post) that I'm not ready to sit for that long with such a potentially depressing topic. As a result, I went back to the drawing board and have been there for quite a while. But working on my current NCS paper on agential Ice in The House of Fame (and revisiting my paper on books as animate objects in Chaucer's works) has renewed my curiosity about the ways in which Chaucer positions and prioritizes various objects in his works — and how he gives them varying degrees of power. While I'm far from fully committed yet, I'm leaning more and more towards diving into this topic in earnest in hopes of producing a larger project that maps out and explores Chaucer's agential objects.

For now, I'll share the paper that got me started along this path (only two years late!):

“Chaucer and the Animated Book”

In the Squire’s Tale, a stranger from Arabye visits the (intensely fictionalized) court of Chinnghis Khan, and presents the Mongol ruler with a series of mirabilia. One of them, a ring, allows the wearer to understand the language of birds. In turn, the brass horse will take its rider anywhere in the world with a turn of a key. These objects, in short, allow their owners to encounter, read, and translate the world around them in entirely new ways. In this respect, they reminded me (as I revisited them a little while back) of books in all of their animating properties.

            This paper explores how we might consider books as animate objects in Chaucer’s literary worlds — as kindred of the animate and animating mirabilia of The Squire’s Tale. Unlike the brass horse or the ring, books are objects that can, in fact, speak in some way — they have the capacity, as Chaucer reveals so persistently, not only to transport but to inspire visions in even the most selective or haphazard of readers.  In this way, books as objects have greater animating properties than the fabled brass horse. A turn of a switch might allow the mechanical beast to transport a rider around the world, but — as Chaucer seems to argue — the turn of a page can produce even more fruitful journeys. For the sake of time, I will limit my discussion largely to Chaucer’s dream vision poetry, though my hope is that we can discuss other appearances of books as objects in Chaucer’s poetry later on.

Dream vision poetry consistently relies on the trope of a narrator falling asleep and “waking” in a dreamscape, where an extended, often didactic, vision ensues. But as Larry Benson and others have observed, Chaucer seems to have invented the convention of the dreamer falling asleep on a book prior to experiencing his dream vision. This image — of the sleeping reader and his book — persists in Chaucer’s poetry, and suggests a certain consistency in his approach to books as objects.

In The Book of the Duchess, both the book and the act of reading offer an escape for the insomnia-addled narrator — an opportunity to “rede and drive the night away” (49). The book that the narrator selects for his nightly reading is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone attracts him the most. He refers to it, in fact, as a “wondyr thinge” (61), and he relays a version of the story that halts abruptly before the lovers’ metamorphosis and reunion. As Helen Phillips and others have argued, by omitting the metamorphosis altogether, the story of Alcyone’s dream more ably parallels the dream vision experienced by the narrator later in the poem. Alcyone, through this omission, becomes a clearer counterpart to the Black Knight, and the story itself focuses (as does the conversation between the narrator and the knight) on the inevitable transience of earthly joy (Phillips 35).

While it is clear that Chaucer may have intended to create this kind of parallel structure, the ties between the book and the dream are utterly lost on the narrator. He stresses at the beginning and end of the poem the impossibility of interpreting the dream.  According to his preface, not even Macrobius or the biblical Joseph could riddle a meaning out of it, and as a result the narrator unceremoniously ends the poem by stating “This was my sweven: now hit ys doon,” refusing to offer any potential commentary or insight into what his dream might mean (1334). Moreover, the narrator only focuses on the theme of sleep and dreaming in the Alcyone narrative, stating how he desperately wishes Juno or Morpheus would grant him the kind of sleep they gave to Alcyone. These instances could suggest that the narrator is either so fixated on his insomnia that he can’t help but focus on this aspect of the text, but they could also suggest that his reading practices are somewhat haphazard. The narrator finds his wish for sleep fulfilled and immediately falls asleep on the book he had been reading. From this point onwards, the intricate dream vision unfolds and it pulls aspects of the Ovidian narrative — the themes of grief and loss overlooked by the narrator — into its landscape. Books, at least in the world of this dream vision poem, can still transport and inspire the mind of even a haphazard or overly selective reader.

The Parliament of Foules treats books in a similar fashion.  Here, we are presented with a narrator who reads a book in order to learn “a certain thing” about love (20). His book of choice: The Dream of Scipio. Like the narrator of The Book of the Duchess, this narrator is also rewarded for his efforts with an elaborate dream vision. And here, as in Book of the Duchess, certain aspects and themes from the book the narrator reads eke their way into the dream itself and are subject to imaginative repurposing; Scipio himself appears to the dreamer at the beginning of the vision, and the importance of common profit in The Dream of Scipio reappears in the later portion of the bird’s debate.

The first section of Parliament, however, contains a passage on the importance of books that sheds additional light on how these particular objects are configured and how they function in Chaucerian dream visions. The narrator tells us that

            Of usage – what for lust and what for lore –

            On bokes rede I ofte, as I you tolde.

            But wherefore that I speke al this? Nat yore

            Agon it happede me for to beholde

            Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde,

            And thereupon, a certeyn thing to lerne,

            The longe day ful faste I redde and yerne.

                        For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,

                        Cometh al this newe corn form yer to yere,

                        And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,

                        Cometh al this new science that men lere.

                        But now to purpose as of this matere:

                        To rede forth hit gan me so delite

                        That al that day me thoughte but a lyte. (15-28)

This description of the book and of the reading process conveys — in ways more elaborate than that seen in The Book of the Duchess — the idea of the book as an object capable of transporting a reader. Books, in this configuration, are objects filled with knowledge. They produce a distracting amount of delight in readers — so much so that readers can find themselves absorbed for an entire day in their contents. The narrator stresses that these objects, moreover, do not lose their capacity to delight because of their age; he elevate the status and appeal of older and dustier tomes, using the analogy of the field to strengthen his case. Books in this configuration produce delight and visionary inspiration, but they also are imbued with creative powers. More than mere repositories of “old” wisdom, they are the direct inspirers of “newe sciences” — new ideas — as well. I think it highly significant that the narrators in the poems mentioned thus far place their emphasis on books rather than the authors who write them. To be sure, authors are mentioned briefly by name, but the book as material object consistently holds the foreground. Animating properties are thus placed squarely in the realm of the inanimate.

            In contrast to these two dream visions, The House of Fame does not describe a narrator falling asleep on a book.  It does, however, have much to say within the actual dream vision about the inspirational power of books to inspire. The narrator of the poem, for instance, encounters an ekphrastic version of Virgil’s Aeneid, and he immediately focuses on the portion of the narrative involving Aeneus and Dido.  He unequivocally takes Dido’s side, criticizing Aeneus at length for treating her so poorly. This episode from Virgil, moreover, reminds the narrator of a host of men who have similarly mistreated their women. These men do not appear directly in Virgil’s story, and as a result, his encounter with this pictographic Aeneid mirrors the narrators’ encounters with physical books described in the other dream visions. Here, as elsewhere, the book is presented as an object that inspires the reader without keeping him bound entirely to its matter.  The narrator also repeatedly stresses that it is “the book” that “tellis” (or speaks), even though Jove — through the Eagle — is said to look fondly on the narrator for his diligent work as an author.  The reader owes his inspiration and his translocation largely to this object, but he is also capable of misreading, misunderstanding, or simply selecting only the portions of the text that are of interest to him or seem applicable; he is also capable of spring–boarding into related thoughts or visions that are only obliquely related to the contents of the book itself.  It is here, then, that a kind of tension emerges, because creative power seems to be transferred to both the reader and the book.  At the same time, it is also possible, I think, to see the reader’s freedom as an indicator that the book has realized its animating potential.

            Out of all of Chaucer’s dream visions, the Legend of Good Women provides the lengthiest homage to books, one that directly addresses their capacities as animated objects.  The passage is a bit long, but I’m going to read it in its entirety since it ties in so directly with what I’ve already discussed:

           
           Than mote we to bokes that we fynde,

Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde,

            And to the doctrine of these olde wyse,

            Yeve credence, in every skylful wise,

            That tellen of these olde appreved stories

            Of holynesse, of regnes, of victories,

            Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges,

            Of whiche I may no maken rehersynges

            And yf that olde bokes were aweye,

            Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.

            Wel ought us thane honouren and believe

            These bokes, there we han noon other preve.

                        And as for me, though that I konne but lyte

            On bokes for to rede I me delyte,

            And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence,

            And in myn herte have hem in reverence

            So hertely, that ther is game noon

            That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,

            Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May

            Is comen, and that here the foules synge,

            And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,

            Farewel my bok and my devocion! (17-39)

Despite his capricious admission at the close of this passage, the narrator repeatedly urges for “credence” to be given to these books, for them to be upheld as authorities in their own right, because they are the only way for readers in his day to access ancient wisdom (this line of thinking echoes what the narrator of Parliament of Foules observes so briefly about old books). They are, in other words, the sole remaining repositories of important knowledge.

He argues that books should be revered specifically because of the voices of authority contained therein. This seems, at least a first, to put the power back into the authors’ hands. However, just as in Parliament of Foules, no authors are mentioned in these lines, which suggests the disembodied nature of authority contained within the books in question. The focus, as a result, remains squarely on the material object. Books, then, are presented as access points and portals to an older time and to writers and thinkers who have long since passed. 

Eventually, the narrator encounters the God of Love, who calls him a foe because of his actions as an author; his “translacyoun” has turned potential lovers away from their devotion to him . What is particularly compelling in this diatribe against the narrator is the way in which books are conceptualized.  The god of Love announces, for instance, “Yis, God wot, sixty bokys olde and newe hast thou thyself, alle fulle of storyis grete” (273-74), which is an impressively large collection for any private owner in the late fourteenth century. This line suggests the importance of books as tactile objects and the importance and significance of collecting them. The god proceeds in subsequent lines to cite authors directly, asking the narrator “what seith Valerye, Titus, Claudyan? / What seith Jerome agayns Jovynyan?” (280-81), questions that do momentarily reintroduce the author as a figure of great significance. However, the authority of the writer is brought directly into question several lines later, when Alceste comes to the Chaucer-narrator’s defense; she argues that he is so used to composing books that he “takyth non hed of what matere he take” and “nyste what he seyde” (343, 345). Chaucer is cast here as an innocent, but rather incompetent and passive author/translator, so involved in the process of creating and/or translating that he neglects to examine his own material. His books, however, are acknowledged directly by the god of Love (and indirectly by Alceste) as potentially harmful to the god’s cause because of their ability to sway their readers.   Here, as elsewhere, then, poem prioritizes books over their authors as objects responsible for an important, and potentially subversive, kind of transportation.

            What this configuration of books suggests is that as soon as the author cuts the cord on a literary work, it is no longer solely his own; it becomes an object capable of inspiring a reader on his or her own terms, a notion that the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde openly admits in the epilogue:

            Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie,

            There god thy maker yet, er that he dye,

            So sende might to make in some comedie!

            But litel book, no making thou n’envye,

            But subgit be to alle poesye;

            And kis the steppes, where-as thou seest pace

            Virgile, Ovyde, Lucan, and Stace.

            And for ther is so greet diversitee

            In English and in writing of our tonge,

            So preye I God that noon miswryte thee,

            Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge.

            And red wherso thou be, or elles songe,

            That thou be understonde I God biseche! (Book V, lines 1786-98)

Chaucer, or the Chaucer narrator, speaks directly to his book in this passage, talking to it as if it has a sentience all its own. Here, as in The Legend of Good Women, he muses on the matter of authority. One the one hand, he admits that the book is now out of his control even though he authored it. But he affirms the significance of authors by citing names of great writers from the past (as the narrators do in each of Chaucer’s dream vision poems). Nevertheless, he ends his envoy to his creation by voicing his anxieties about how it will be treated (and potentially mistreated) by readers. Once again, then, Chaucer positions the book as an object that, while responsible for the connectivity between author and reader, is ultimately in neither his nor his readers’ control.

To draw upon what Karl Steel observed in his paper given on Tuesday, this representation of books certainly forces us to remember that, as he put it, we cannot relegate the matter of intentionality solely to humans; inanimate object are indeed “forceful entities.”  But unlike many inanimate objects studied across the animate ecologies panels at this conference, books are man-made objects, and they have a different kind of animate capacity as a result. They may well be compendiums of wisdom, but they are also, ultimately springboards.  They are animating objects, but they do not command the perfect attention of their readers, no more than an author can control the way in which his or her work is understood; it is no surprise then, that the matter of misreading comes up consistently and in a variety of ways throughout Chaucer’s works.

In this way, books contain animating properties that are both powerful but finite. On the one hand, the process of reading a book results in the dream visions, but the fact remains that the reader isn’t bound to the written text he has just encountered. This has made me begin to wonder whether we might be able to understand Chaucer’s — or the Chaucer narrators’ — somewhat persistent anxiety over being misread through an understanding of books as finitely animate objects, as objects made by an author but no longer in that person’s control once they are completed, an idea that in many ways evokes modern theoretical patterns of thought, especially Barthe’s “death of the author” and the related realm of reader-response theory.

The figure of Pandarus reflects this idea of authorial anxiety, and also evokes the animating properties of books, and I’ll close this paper by briefly examining how his presence in Troilus aligns with the representation of books in the works I’ve previously discussed. Throughout Troilus, Pandarus acts (as Carolyn Dinshaw has argued) as a poet creating a text, and — I would offer — as a poet inspired by texts like the romances of which he seems to be so fond. In Book III, Pandarus — after having tossed Troilus into bed with Criseyde — curls up by the fire and pretends to read. To quote the text directly, he “took a light and fond his countenance / as for to look upon an old romance” (979-80). These lines, like the passages about reading in the dream visions, reveal the animating properties of books.  Here, the lovers become objects of Pandarus “play,” and they are positioned as characters in a romance twice over as a result. Pandarus in turn, can be understood in this scene as either reading a book (a romance) or as watching the lovers as if they are characters in a romance.  If we follow the second interpretation, the lover’s bed becomes a book, one that reflects the creative (and potentially procreative) desires and aims of its author while also remaining simultaneously beyond the creator’s control and domain. Pandarus, like the authors of the books encountered in the dream vision poems, only has but so much control over the very story he seeks to create. Similarly, books only come about through the work of human hands, but once that work is finished the book itself becomes object with animating and creative properties all its own.

A book might seem, as the Chaucer plaintively suggests at the end of Troilus, at the mercy of its readers, but it never loses its capacity to animate and enliven.  Readers and books, in this configuration, require each other for animation. Chaucer consistently exposes their animating circuitry with regularity, suggesting his persistent engagement with the idea of books as objects, with the notion that the seemingly inanimate book can, in fact, continue to develop and possess animating properties long after an author takes “a light.”

Bibliography

• Amtower, Laurel. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000.
• Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1987.
• Phillips, Helen and Nick Havely, eds. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. London: Longman, 1997.

On Time and the Garden

Asheville skyline and Blue Ridge Mountains

I've had a whirlwind summer thus far, and it's gone by too fast (especially since there's still so much more work to do . . .). I've tried to research and write, and taken on many (too many) side projects (as my last post mentioned). I've been planning a brand-new ESOL course, which I'll teach in the fall and spring. I had a beautiful road trip to Asheville, North Carolina to help my friend Ali move, and enjoyed spending time there with close friends and exploring both the city itself and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. I also attended my first New Chaucer Society conference in Portland, Oregon. I found the conference to be, as the best conferences always are, equal parts invigorating and exhausting. All of the panels I attended were excellent and the discussion lively. My own panel went really well. I got great questions, and I felt that all of the papers worked together beautifully to bring out new ideas. I was also lucky enough to be presenting on the same panel with my friend Sharon, who gave her first conference paper, which was excellent. I was reminded once again of how lucky I am to be in a field with such intelligent, warm, lively people.They're people who pose interesting questions and allow for productive dialogue.

Portland Chinese Gardens
(Where the reflections are more real than the buildings.)

This conference is set up particularly well for graduate students, with generous financial assistance, a full-day graduate seminar, and a generally welcoming environment in which all are made to feel part of the community. I met some new people and spent time with old friends; I saw many wonderful papers and a really outstanding plenary lecture by Carolyn Dinshaw. Dinshaw spoke eloquently about history and temporality and Mandeville's Travels. I also got to explore Portland a bit and to visit some delightful family members whom I don't see often enough.

Countryside outside my hometown
(Where I've had some new adventures this trip)

Now, after two years away, I am home for a visit to Northern California. The last time I was home, I was here for the birth of my friend Dominique's son. This time I made it to that son's second birthday party. The differences between the newborn baby and two-year-old make concrete for me the temporal distance between my last visit and this one. I am staying with my grandmother in my childhood home, a place filled with memories of the times I had there and the people I've loved who used to live there and who live there still. I still expect to discover my grandfather dozing in a chair when I walk into a new room. I still expect to hear my father's voice calling for me from the next room to come and see something he's discovered in the newspaper or in a book or online. I am aware of the way in which the space I'm in exists relatively unchanged, and only time separates me from previous moments in the same locations. I'm particularly struck by the garden, much grander than it was when I was a child. I spent so many happy hours in that yard, swinging on my swing set or having adventures or pretending to be in a fairy land.

Roses from our garden

My grandpa spent many hours in the yard as well, working in his treasured rose garden and planting new varieties of tomato. Three activities my grandfather loved above all: photography, hiking, and gardening. I would swing and he would garden and we would need no words to express our contentment. I see traces of him everywhere in this garden. Flowers that he planted still bloom each year, their colors bursting forth from the past into the present. My dad loved the garden, too, and had information and opinions on every plant. When we had landscaping done some years back, my father would bake treats and make snacks and bring them out to the gardeners and just talk to them for hours. When I stand in the garden now, I feel comforted in knowing that a space they both loved so much is still thriving.

Park outside of Portland

I was primed by the NCS conference to think about time and the garden. There was so much discussion at the conference of time, history, and space (as with the plenary I mentioned above), of ecologies, of objects. (There was also a whole thread on oceans! I presented on a panel in this thread, and saw some other incredible oceans panels as well.) One of the conference receptions was held in the beautiful Chinese Gardens, a lush location which fostered much happy mingling between scholars young and old (aided by a generous sprinkling of champagne). I had also gone for a walk outside of Portland with my cousins Susan and John, who had explained to me that the topography we saw (verdant trees and brooks) would have covered downtown Portland, a fairly new city, only about a hundred years ago. Trees have been cleared away to make room for streets and buildings, but wild greenery still makes its presence known around the margins of the city. We walked from this landscape past the mowed lawns of suburban Portland, and I noticed the similarities and differences of these landscapes. I also visited the Buffalo Botanical Gardens earlier this summer, a Victorian greenhouse wonderland filled with spaces that seem wild (carnivorous plants lurk in one spot, koi fish swim playfully in another), and yet in which everything is contained and categorized. The rooms are carefully themed and the enclosed nature of the space allows for a great deal of control. With all these experiences this summer, both recreational and professional, I was uniquely prepared to think about urban spaces and greenery as I returned to my childhood home.

Buffalo Botanical Gardens

Gardens are complex spaces; they're natural and yet cultivated. My grandmother talks brightly to me of one plant that has been carefully chosen and another, right next to the first, which, as she puts it, "the birds brought to us -- a delightful surprise." No matter how deliberately a garden is maintained or controlled (I'm looking at you, topiary), the natural world will make its mark. Animals and weather patterns, for example, cannot be easily regulated. So the garden is both natural and manmade. Gardens are popular spots in medieval literature because of their liminal existence in a variety of categories. They blur the line between public and private, outside and inside. Medieval dream vision poems most often begin in gardens, complicating the distinction between awake and asleep, reality and dreaming. I am reading Bachelard's book on The Poetics of Space right now, and he praises the house for enabling us to dream. In medieval literature, it is often the garden that facilitates dreaming (though Chaucer sometimes writes about falling asleep in bed while reading a good book, a practice all too familiar to me).

Can you spot the swing?

There's also a real way in which the garden we have now is the garden of my family's dreams. Much planning and discussion and work and love went into the garden, and everyone felt as if they were witnessing, as the plants grew and blossomed, their floral visions coming to vivid life. And, in some cases, exceeding imagination. Plants grow and change and interact in surprising ways. I walked into the backyard and was astonished at how plants have covered my old swing set. A tiny swing emerges from a tangle of leaves and flowers, barely visible from a distance. When I was young, it was the swing set which defined that backyard space for me. Its crisp lines divided the space and were easily visible from inside the house. Now, from inside, I could almost miss the swing if I didn't know it were there. I moved into this home when I was seven, and the swing set was there waiting for me. It is the same swing set that my dad and aunt and uncle played on before I was born. My grandpa put that swing set up in the yard in 1964 when they moved to this house, but it had been in the family before that, traveling with them from Oxnard to Santa Cruz to Sunnyvale before landing here in Petaluma. My grandparents first set up the swing set around 1950, before my father was born, so he played on it his whole childhood and then I did the same. The swing set always seemed to me a tangible object connecting me to my father's childhood. It connected me to past and future, ground and sky. If I swung high enough, I could see both our own yard and over the fence to the plum trees in the yard next door. There's a freedom for a child in swinging, but a contained freedom, a comfortable kind of freedom. Within the confines of our yard I could have adventures and know that an adult was right around the corner. The swing set always seemed a permanent fixture, rooted in the ground like a metal tree, a part of the yard more reliable than the fleeting petals that visited the garden in spring. The fact that the swing set had in fact been relocated multiple times, that it neither grew from the yard nor originated there, simply didn't fit with my conception of my childhood.

A new photo I made to look old
-- more playing with time

Flowers bloomed and wilted, but that swing set was always there, would always be there. Now, as the leaves and flowers cover and enclose the swing, I see that the swing set really has been taken into the garden. The overgrowth has made the set its own, has turned it into a kind of trellis, covered by plants but also holding them up in a kind of symbiosis of metal and paint and flower and leaf. Unlike the inside of the house, the garden really looks nothing like it did when I was little; changes happen and are made to happen. But if I look close enough I can see traces of my childhood, of my dad's childhood and my grandparents' adult life. The swing is still there, hidden amidst the leaves like a secret memory; the baby rosebush my grandpa planted for me in seventh grade (a rough year for me, as for many kids) still blooms amid newer plants. Layers of vegetation and layers of memory intertwine in that space which is both of the house and separate from it. Some of the same plants bloom, but their petals are new each year, highlighting the ways in which temporality and tangibility can be both very fragile and very real.

The Poetics of Grief: Considering Pearl and Wm. Paul Young's The Shack.

Grief has a funny way of choking out your perspective and balance. It's so easy to let that creeping vine take hold, and once you do, it's so very hard to wrench yourself free.  Grief can become, during our darker moments, a trickster-friend. You get so used to its presence that you forget how to live without it, insidious though the relationship might be.

Having spent the better part of this Fall attempting to journey forward after an intensely personal and awful loss (I miscarried right before the start of the term), I've found myself thinking a lot about how humans grieve, and on the literature that has been born out of these moments of agony. So much has been written on this topic, but for me, poetic works and their explorations of how we suffer and grapple with loss have always moved me the most and have helped to transport me (or at least begin the journey) out of those dark spaces.  The journey to a place of peace and balance after experiencing a profound loss is always a difficult one, and I have grown fascinated with, and taken considerable comfort from, those who have written about their own journeys through grief as a result.

Given that most of what I study these days is medieval, I have found myself thinking a lot about Pearl of late. The poem has been one of my favorites ever since I first encountered it as an undergraduate.  Nearly a decade later and particularly in light of my most recent loss, I have returned to the poem with a fuller awareness of the grief that gives Pearl its initial fuel and momentum.

Simultaneously, I've found myself thinking as well about a far more recent work: The Shack. The novel is, at its core, a framed dream vision. The first eighty pages or so chronicle the protagonist's (Mac's) loss of his youngest daughter, Missy. This portion of the novel is agonizing, and it ends in the very place where the authorities find clear evidence of Missy's murder – a dilapidated shack in the wilds of Oregon. Mac returns to the shack after receiving a cryptic invitation from "Papa" – the name that his wife, Nan, uses for God.  He falls asleep in the shack after a fit of rage and an ensuing mental breakdown, and when he "wakes" he enters into a dream vision in which he finds the comfort he's been searching for and his release from grief and anger.   

What strikes me the most about both of these works is the candor with which they recount the deeply personal and awful grief that comes with the loss of a child (or any loved one). Both Mac and the narrator of Pearl are angry, lost, and utterly encased in their grief at the outset of these works.  As I returned to them both over the past few weeks, I immediately identified with these characters because of that. Their questions, their hurt, but most of all, their journeys through grief to a place of balance felt so deeply familiar and so strangely comforting.

As I kept thinking about these two works (largely in isolation at first), I began to realize just how much they actually share. Granted, there are NUMEROUS differences (cultural, structural, and theological) that separate them, but I found certain aspects profoundly intertwined nonetheless. For starters, both the Pearl narrator and Mac have — as I mentioned earlier — allowed their grief to consume all aspects of their lives by the time that we're introduced to them. Take, for instance, stanza five of Pearl:

Bifore that spot my honde I spenned
For care ful colde that to me caght.
A deuely dele in my hert denned
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther was penned
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght -
Suche odour to my hernes schot,
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot. (49-56)

Before that spot my hands I clasped / For care full cold that seized upon me / A desolating grief in my heart lay deep / Though reason would have reconciled me. / I mourned my pearl that there was trapped / With fierce arguments that fast contended, / My wretched will in woe nature wrought . . .

The speaker here kneels over the very spot where he "lost" his pearl — which is often interpreted as a young daughter — and laments that the awareness of this loss "does nothing but pierce my heart sharply, / Swell and burn my breast painfully" (17-18).

Mac's grief after Missy's abduction and and murder is similarly all-consuming:

Little distractions like the ice storm were a welcome although brief respite from the haunting presence of his constant companion: The Great Sadness, as he referred to it. Shortly after the summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy quilt.  The weight of its presence dulled his eyes and stooped his shoulders. Even his efforts to shake it off were exhausting, as if his arms were sewn into its bleak folds of despair, and he had somehow become part of it. He ate, worked, loved, dreamed, and played in this garment of heaviness, weighed down as if he were wearing a leaden bathrobe – trudging daily through the murky despondency that sucked the color out of everything.

At times he could feel The Great Sadness slowly tightening around his chest and heart like the crushing coils of a constructor, squeezing liquid from his eyes until he thought there no longer remained a reservoir. Other times he would dream that his feet were stuck in cloying mud as he caught brief glimpses of Missy running down the wooded path ahead of him, her red cotton summer dress gilded with wildflowers flashing through the trees. She was completely oblivious to the dark shadow tracking her from behind. Although he frantically tried to scream warnings to her, no sound emerged and he was always too late and too impotent to save her. He would bolt upright in bed, sweat dripping from his tortured body, while waves of nausea and guilt and regret rolled over him like some surreal tidal flood.  (27)

Both protagonists find themselves utterly consumed by their awareness of what they have lost. It dominates their thoughts and oppresses any capacity for joy.  Seeking (whether they realize it or not) an end to their suffering, both journey to origin point of their pain: to the places where they lost their beloved children.  The Pearl narrator moves into a garden (often interpreted as a graveyard) where his pearl "sprang away" from him, while Mac journeys to the shack where they found Missy's dress and an awful blood-stain, clear evidence of her murder.

It is through this return to a place of complete pain that their dream visions occur. The dreamer in Pearl "awakens" to find himself in a transcendent and beautiful landscape, where he soon encounters the Pearl Maiden — a figure who both represents the child he lost and the Divine Wisdom he so desperately needs. Mac, in turn, wakes from his despair-induced slumber inside the shack and exits in complete frustration, only to find the landscape slowly transform itself from Winter to Spring and the desolate shack reshape itself into a warm and inviting log cabin, with clear signs of life inside. Mac is soon greeted by three humans, each of whom is revealed as an aspect of the Trinitarian God. 

From here, The Shack diverges markedly from Pearl in a number manner of ways, but a pivotal moment in the second half of the novel shares much with the medieval dream vision as well.  In this particular episode, Mac finds himself and his outlook — overshadowed as it is by The Great Sadness — challenged and questioned by Sophia.  Just as the Pearl Maiden challenges the narrator's misguided, grief-stricken perceptions, chiding him at one point for having misinterpreted and incorrectly contextualized his loss (5.265-76), Sophia forces Mac to face his destructive worldview in a similarly blunt and masterful way.  At the end of their dialogue — which proves as cathartic and transformative as the dialogue between the Pearl narrator and the Pearl Maiden — Mac is given a glimpse of Missy in the afterlife. He sees her playing with his other children (who are, themselves, experiencing dream visions of their own), and she eventually runs directly towards him. An invisible force (represented by a waterfall) separates them, but Mac is told that she knows that he is there "on the other side of the waterfall." Mac tries desperately to get to her, but the invisible force won't let him move. Once he stops, however, and simply gazes on her, taking in "every detail of her expression and hair and hands" she smiles at him and mouths "It's okay, I . . . love you." Sophia tells him at this point that while Missy cannot see him, she knows that he is there, and that she herself chose for their meeting to be this way. Eventually "the water roared down from above, directly in front of him, and obliterated all the sights and sounds of his children" and he finds himself in a grotto behind a waterfall (exactly where he had entered to talk with Sophia). Like the Pearl narrator, then, Mac is challenged in this portion of the narrative by a female counselor who speaks with Divine authority.  His resulting vision of his daughter, in turn, challenges his attachment to The Great Sadness and affirms what he has learned from Sophia. Just as the Pearl Maiden chides the narrator for becoming too attached to his limited perception of the world, Mac learns that he cannot – in the end – be the world's, or God's, judge, and that the more he accepts the limitations of his perception, the more free and more joyful he will become. The Great Sadness, then, loses its power because it can only hang over him so long as he convinces himself that his perceptions are wholly accurate. 

The water imagery in this scene, I should add, also parallels Pearl, because in both the protagonists meet their lost children but are separated from them by an impassable body of water. The water prevents the dreamer from completely accessing the afterlife and those within it.  Both Mac and the Pearl narrator try frantically to cross these bodies of water at certain points and rejoin their beloved children, only to realize that their reunion cannot come to pass while they are both alive. Both find their attempts to ford the barrier to be in vain — the Pearl narrator is held back initially by the maiden's words, and eventually wakes up because he tries to ford the stream. Mac, in turn, tries repeatedly to force his way through the invisible barrier, but to no avail, and Sophia eventually explains that the barrier is truly impenetrable. The fact that they want so desperately to experience the physical presence of their lost ones speaks, rather poignantly, to their reliance upon their limited sensory perceptions.  What they learn — in no small part through these vain attempts — is that true vision and wisdom lie in a state beyond the senses. They learn, as a little prince once said, that "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

As Pearl winds its way to a close, as the narrator comes to discover a world and a worldview much larger than his grief, the word "delyt" appears frequently, suggesting that the narrator has begun to move forward from the place of grief that brought him into the dream vision. Mac too finds a way to reclaim his life from The Great Sadness and to live in joy not in spite of his loss, but because of it. Both works, in their own way, explore the ways in which we can locate a sense of purpose in the midst of these awful losses. And this isn't to say, as Mac mistakenly observes, that these events come to pass for the benefit of our souls and psyches, but rather that "grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors" (The Shack, 188).

Ultimately, I'm not seeking to argue here that the author of The Shack drew inspiration from Pearl. Rather, my point in drawing out this comparison is to suggest that both of these works — separated as they are by centuries, by theological nuance, by culture — tap into the same mysteries of loss in uncannily similar ways, and that these similarities can — if we let them — remind us that we are never truly alone in our grief, deeply and intensely personal as those experiences always are. Considering these works alongside each other can offer us the deep and abiding comfort of knowing that when we experience the intensity of loss and grief, that we are entering into a strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure the same. This may seem terribly bleak at first, but it's actually — in my mind at least — quite beautiful to know that even with full knowledge of the pain that will come with the loss of our beloved "pearles," that we can never quite keep ourselves away from love. That we are always invited and drawn back into relationship with others and with ourselves because of these risks. Pearls of great price, indeed.