Of Words and Worlds

And I mean whirlwind literally ...

I am just recovering from the whirlwind that was the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I am torn between a desire for rest/hibernation and a frantic need to write down as much of my experience as possible. (In reality, neither of these options is possible in the face of gradinggradinggrading.) It was, as always, a rich experience in a variety of ways. I am consistently blown away by the generosity and intelligence and engagement of the scholars in my field, and I am feeling a renewed excitement about my work and my career despite the depressing challenging nature of the academic job market. I can't sum up all of the panels and papers I saw and heard right now, but I will post the roundtable presentation I gave, "England by any Other Name: Nominal Topographies in The Tale of Albin." The roundtable—"What a World!"—was sponsored by the BABEL Working Group on the theme of worldbuilding, and it featured inspired and inspiring papers on topics that seemed wide-ranging but that came together in surprising and delightful ways. I had difficulty crafting my contribution, since I have never participated in a roundtable before, and I am not used to writing such short papers (for those not familiar with such things, a traditional conference presentation is 15-20 minutes, and a roundtable presentation is 5, which allows for more in-depth discussion). Although cutting the paper down to size was physically and emotionally painful, it was also liberating to just present the core of an idea and see how it functioned in terms of a larger conversation. I've written about the strange tale of Albin here before in my Jurassic Park post, but for this presentation I was thinking about naming as a form of worldbuilding. I was considering how a chronicle presents everything side-by-side even as individual colonizers attempt to write over what came before. Here is the basic presentation (minus, of course, spontaneous ad-libs and larger discussion):

Every schoolchild in medieval Europe knew that countries worth a name could trace that name back to the battle of Troy. And every schoolchild in medieval England knew that a man named Brutus climbed from the wreckage of his fallen city and sailed to an island on the edge of the world, which he called Britain for himself. Conquest, lineage, and naming are all interconnected in England's mytho-historic beginnings. But the island has another name, Albion, and thus another origin story. Texts such as The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle describe a Greek princess, Albin, who plots to murder her husband because he attempts to restrict her wild nature. Exiled from her homeland, she lands on an unnamed, uninhabited island, naming it for herself and populating it by mating with a devil to produce giant offspring who rule the island until Brutus arrives to rename it. I contend that the tale imagines national origins as deriving from words as much as actions. Speech acts claim the island for each named character. When Albin names the island for herself, she makes it in her own image. Naming is both the catalyst for worldbuilding and also a kind of worldbuilding. Just as important as their actual building is their imagined construction of the place by virtue of the names they choose.

The Chronicle opens with a declaration that "Here may men rede whoso can/ Hou Jnglond first bigan" [Here men may read if they can/ How England first began] (1-2). The text itself is a "here," a place for readers to discover their own national background. And though the tale begins in faraway Greece, Albin soon arrives on an island called "þis lond" [this land] and "here" (306, 307). Thus we have a tangible connection between the story and the current location. When Albin arrives with her sisters on “this land,” she colonizes with a speech act: "'Listeneþ sostren þat be min,/ Y schal ȝou telle hou it schal be:/ Þis lond ichil sese to me,/ After mi name Albion/ ȝe schullen it clepe euerichon'" [Listen sisters that are mine,/ I shall tell you how it shall be:/ This land I shall seize to me,/ After my name Albion/ you shall call it everyone] (312-316). The colonial fantasy of an uninhabited and unnamed land allows Albin a blank slate upon which to create a society in her own image. The island contains nothing "Bot wode & wildernisse" [but wood and wilderness], and their main impact on the land is to populate it with giants (325). The giants hold the land until Brutus arrives 800 years later, finding that "Al was wode & wildernisse," indicating that neither Albin nor her giant progeny did much to cultivate the land (369). The fantasy of arriving on an empty island is followed by the fantasy of arriving on an island populated only by monsters. Brutus gives the island the familiar name of Britain for himself, replacing an earlier title as he reinscribes the land with his own culture. He and his men kill off the giants and "falwede erþe & felled wode/ Of þis lond þat was so wilde./ Þai bigun tounes to bilde" [tilled earth and felled wood/ Of this land that was so wild./ They began to build towns] (450-452). He repurposes the wood and stones he finds, creating an urban landscape out of a wild one. 

Even fences can't contain what was there before
(A photo I took in Scotland, 2011)

Like Albin before him, Brutus displays the power of words to shape reality. The narrator explains that as "Brut sett Londen ston" [Brutus set London's stone] he announced that if kings who were to come after him continued to care for the city as he did in his day, then men would be able to see hereafter "'Þat Troye nas neuer so fair cite/ So þis cite schal be.'" [That Troy was never as fair a city/ As this city shall be] (457; 463-4). The scene concludes his speech with the comment that the city was named "Þilke time, þurth Brutus mouþe" [At that time, through Brutus's mouth"] (465). Brutus's speech is conflated with an image of literally setting London in stone, giving his words a monumental quality. The words Brutus uses to discuss his city look forward to future generations, extending the line and connecting to the larger chronicle leading to contemporary London. Yet if Brutus's words are meant to ring true and if the stones he placed contain in them a tangible connection to the readers' own environment, then Albin and her giants must also be connected. Brutus might build upon Albion and add his name to it, but his is a palimpsestic relation to Albin. Her name and her wild country still remain underneath British cities. Maybe she and her giants bear no blood relation to later people of the island, but they bear a chronological relation. They trod the same ground and called it their own.

Both Brutus and Albin exist for British history only insofar as their names link etymologically to the names associated with that island. The land Albin claims and the giants she produces are both wild, and both must be restrained and re-envisioned in order for Brutus to create a land in his own image. But Brutus's words, though they can reimagine and restructure the island, cannot undo the words spoken by Albin. Albin's name is still associated with the land to this day, and the ground is still that her giants tread, the wood and stones that make up the city still those that she claimed when she arrived on the island and called it her own. Words, even spoken words, can be written permanently onto a landscape and shape how a nation sees itself. If worldbuilding serves to construct an imaginary world, then perhaps a chronicle works to build an imaginary past for an existing world. Brutus places his name over Albin’s, but the chronicle presents them side-by-side, creating a national identity out of an amalgam of fantastic origins.

Kalamazoo 2013: A Pilgrimage

I wrote most of this from about 36,000 feet above Newfoundland – a fitting starting point, I think, since I was returning to the U.S. from Norway by way of Iceland (after attending a conference on medieval Scandinavian literature, no less).

I had a long a fruitful journey during the month of May, and I’ll try to do some of it justice over the course of a few posts. These posts are a bit delayed because I came back from Norway with a fever and raging laryngitis and have spent the better part of the past week recouping! I’m doing much better now though, and will be loading several posts throughout the next week or so now that I'm capable of lucid thought. This first one will focus on Kalamazoo, which was certainly the busiest Congress I’ve ever attended. I presided twice, organized and participated in a performance session, and presented a paper on Pearl. There were lunches, dinners, and outings aplenty, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’d been feeling severely run down prior to the trip. The lack of full-time work has been stressful, especially since my husband’s start-up had to let him go earlier this year, and there were a series of personal tragedies right around that time that made life painfully confusing and heart-breaking. Whenever tragedy has truck in the past, I’ve looked to my work to feel some sense of purpose or control, but the screeds against graduate school, the humanities, etc., the rise of MOOCS and for-profit institutions (and attitudes), and the at times oppressive amount of uncertainty surrounding my own future really dampened my ability to feel and hold onto a sense of purposefulness. As a result, I came to Kalamazoo feeling more than a little beaten down and adrift. More and more though, I’ve come to see the journey to Congress, and the experience of it, as a sort of pilgrimage. One that comes just at the right time — just as I’m starting to lose my sense of why I do what I do. I am so profoundly glad that I made the journey this time, because it renewed more of my enthusiasm and my sense of purpose than I’d ever hoped to win back in such a short span of time.

For starters, this was a ‘zoo of serendipitous encounters. I’d been so busy (between the end of the semester hustle, visiting family, and prepping for two conferences) that I’d only made contact with just a few of the people I’d hoped to see at this conference. Somehow though, I happened to be at the right places at the right times, because I managed to bump into just about everyone! The conversations may have only lasted a couple of minutes in some cases, but it meant the world to see familiar faces from grad school and past conferences and at least get a brief moment to reconnect.

The serendipity also extended into new meetings as well. Thanks to a chance encounter at one of many dinners out, I received sage advice about approaching publishers about my book project. Inspired, I spent time Saturday and Sunday chatting with publishers and had several encouraging conversations along the way. While there aren’t any guarantees, I’ve got a clear sense now of who to send materials to once I’ve got them completed, and that’s a great place to be (especially after having felt so stagnant for the past couple of months). I also had an absolutely marvelous time at the BABEL meet-up at Bell’s Brewery. I joined the working group in the Fall of last year because I’ve enjoyed following the playful, experimental, but always meaningful work that BABLErs produce. I also joined because I’d been feeling adrift since moving away from my tightknit community at Rochester last year, and joining an energetic cohort like this one seemed like a wise move as I transition into this new and liminal stage of academic life.  My schedule at the Congress had kept me away from the meeting and the sponsored sessions thus far (alas!), and so I felt all the more drawn to the gathering in spite of the late hour (I think I got there around 11:30pm after having gone over my paper which I was presenting the following morning). An array of wonderful exchanges ensued, and a nascent project even emerged by way of a conversation about bears, idiot tourists, and lava. I’ll keep things cryptic for now, but I’ll hopefully be able to post more about said project in the near future. In the meantime, I’m struck with a profound sense of gratitude for all of the people I met and reconnected with at this conference. Their generosity — in their advice, their sharing of ideas, their collaborative spirit — overwhelmed me in the best sense of the word, and I’m deeply grateful for the renewed energy and enthusiasm they helped instill in me in such a short span of time.

The sessions I attended also went a long way towards renewing my enthusiasm. It’s always a delight to be surrounded by people as vibrantly excited as you are about a particular topic, and that enthusiasm really shone in the sessions I was able to attend and in which I had the pleasure of participating. The first one I attended was “Romancing Islam,” and I was deeply impressed with Bonnie Erwin’s masterful connection between the mechanics of othering in Ferumbras and in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing: a connection that hinges on the desire for the familiar Other (in both cases, a Muslim Other by way of convenient branding). I was also very glad to see an Early Modernist on the panel. Dennis Britton spoke on the allegorizing of Islam in the Faerie Queene, and made a compelling case for the influence of contemporary proto-ethnograpic writings on Spenser’s portrayal of the (Islamicized) figures Wrath and Lust. He also convincingly argued that moments of conversion in Book II (where these figures regularly appear) are not only absent but “actively denied.” In this formulation, the Saracens are made to be incompatible in ways strikingly convergent with those seen in medieval romance. His presence on the panel and the inclusion of Spenser alongside medieval texts invited both the speakers and the audience in the Q&A session to get out from under the pressures of periodization and to talk across the (often fictionalized) divide between the Medieval and Early Modern periods. I joked on Twitter earlier in the year about creating an anti-Greenblatt panel for K’zoo called “Interswervist Aesthetics,” but it was lovely to see much of what The Swerve seems to advocate effortlessly elided in the conversations that came out of this session.

The same kind of connectivity seen in this session extended into the one over which I was delighted to preside. The papers knitted together incredibly well, and I was thrilled by how — despite the focus on a the editing of a single manuscript — each paper had something unique to offer to the conversation. Joyce Coleman focused on the images in the manuscript, specifically those attached to Pearl, and persuasively argued that the illustrator sought to draw parallels between the dreamer/narrator of the poem and Narcissus as he appears in illustrations of Roman de la Rose. Kelsey Moskal asked that we try to find a way to avoid “sterilizing the manuscript reading process” by finding ways to acknowledge the subtle but significant markers, details, and ordination found in the manuscript itself as we produce critical editions. Elias Fahssi stressed the power of exploratory reading, and how faithful reproductions of the text assist in that process. Finally Arthur Bahr challenged our uses of punctuation when it comes to a poem like “Patience,” observing that the quatrain marks in the manuscript are important specifically because they are so difficult to interrogate. He argued that the marks, while not being puncti, suggest a certain kind of pause, which seems especially apt in this poem given its stress on the length of time it “takes humans to perform God’s will.” The inclusion of these marks, then, link readers to Jonah, reminding us that “we are bound in time, differing from Jonah only in degree, not in time.” In the end, Bahr offered up the possibility that we needn’t punctuate definitively, especially when it comes to a poem like “Patience” that seems to be playing with the kinds of pauses produced by such marks.

The conversation that sprang from these four papers was wonderfully lively, and we discussed, among other things, the ways in which we might reconcile all of these various needs and emphases when trying to produce accessible critical editions.  More than anything, I think the session really drove home the sacrifices that inevitably get made when trying to prepare these texts for modern readership, and it was gratifying to see so many people engaged in a discussion of how we can serve both the reader and the original text. To that end, I was very happy to hear later on at the conference that Kelsey and Elias will be taking on more active and official roles in the Pearl Poet Society — as contributors to the fantastic Cotton Nero A.x. Project, and in light of their illuminating papers, I can hardly imagine a better team!

I’ll save a discussion of the session in which I presented — “New Perspectives on Pearl” — for my next post (one that will include the actual talk), but all I’ll say for now is that I was tremendously grateful for the experience and for the feedback received both prior to and during the session itself.  I’m starting to experiment with ideas for a later project (once I get this first book off and away. . . god, if it were only so easy!), and I was so glad, as a result, to have this opportunity to present my nascent ideas for that potential work. More on that later though!

The last session I attended was BABEL’S Blunder panel, and what a delight it was! In some respects, the papers couldn’t have been further apart — with topics ranging from blunder in Beowulf, to the cruelty/inanity of blind peer-review evaluations, to the poetics of scribal blunders, to the poetics of our own conference papers/sessions, to the inception of Fumblr — hands down one of the most humanizing academic blogs I’ve yet encountered. I was struck by the beautiful discursiveness of these presentations, by their verve and energy, by their braveness. Those qualities extended into the lively conversation/debate that followed, one that focused for a time on the perils of blind peer-review. Eileen Joy made a particularly innervating statement about the problems with the current review system, problems that were made painfully clear in Maggie Williams and Nancy Thompson's presentation: that reviewers forget all too often that they’re dealing with human beings who have struggled hard to produce the work that they’re tasked with reviewing. If we are in the business of the humanities, she argued, then we need to start treating each other more humanely. This does not, as one person in the crowd worried, mean that we have to pull our punches when we review, or that we – as receivers of criticism – shouldn’t have a thick skin. Rather, as I offered in tandem with others, we owe it to ourselves (if we are really going to pride ourselves in our mastery of language) and to those whose work we review to write both effectively and humanely. Ultimately, I think that double-blind peer review can be essential to fair treatment in the realm of publishing (people are, for instance, presumably less likely to be discriminated against for a variety of unfair reasons), but as so many of the audience members and presenters stressed, it’s often rather easy to tell who is reviewing your work or who authored the piece you are reviewing. As such, the question remains as to how helpful this set-up actually is, especially when it seems to give so many people license to behave rather unhelpfully (not to mention rather poorly) because they can hide behind the mask of anonymity.

No Congress would be complete without a fair share of levity, and so it was all too fitting that I capped everything off by attending the Pseudo-Society with a merry band of friends. The papers were hilarious, and I especially loved the fact that they so freely poked fun at the conventions of the academic conference. It’s always good to be reminded not to take yourself or what you do too seriously, and the pseudo-society’s “talks” did a more than decent job of reminding us of that!

All in all, this was certainly one of the most fruitful and fulfilling conferences I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend, and I’m already looking forward to next year. As I’ve said throughout this post, attending the conference did a tremendous amount to boost my spirits and enthusiasm for what I do. It helped to remind me, in a series of truly profound ways, that I have made good decisions about my career (no matter what the screeds might say), and that while my life might be precarious and under a variety of intense pressures, it’s also full of electric opportunity. And so, in closing, I’d like to say thank you — a thousand times over — to all of the wonderful people at this conference who helped remind me of that.