As I transition from one coast to another, one school year to another, and one season to another, I think a lot about thresholds. I try hard to think of each phase or moment or experience in my life as a thing unto itself instead of a place between. Graduate school, for example, could be a liminal space between college and career, but it seems a shame to think of such an extended period of my life as simply a means to an end (especially in this uncertain market). Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop, reading or writing, and I really reflect on how privileged I am to be able to spend some years of my life learning and thinking and growing as a person and a scholar. How amazing it is to sit in the afternoon sunlight, reading a book and learning even more about the things I love. How incredible it is to work with students and to see them really think about literature and the world around them. Even the struggle to come up with new ideas, the intensity of teaching, the insecurities which come with grad school -- those are a part of my life, a part of all that's good in it and all that makes it worthwhile to me. These years, I must remind myself, are valuable unto themselves.
As a medievalist, the struggle against the idea of middles is constant. Though the term "Middle Ages" is certainly less pejorative than "Dark Ages," it still gives a sense of a period between the glory of Rome and the Renaissance. A placeholder in history. It seems doubtful to me that people woke up on New Year's Day of 1500 (or 1495 or 1450 or 1350 or 1300 …) and felt suddenly reborn. Even midnight on New Year's, which seems to be a crystal-clear liminal point, shatters when we consider all of the time zones of the world. Watching through a television set in the United States as the ball drops in Australia, I can't help but feel a bit unsettled about our privileging of that particular moment. Nor can I fail to notice when I reach the new year in New York before my friends in California do. And this is not to mention the fact that there are different calendars in the world that have different New Year's, and the fact that even our Gregorian calendar has been used with different New Year's in mind. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been several possible dates, and people in the Early Modern period celebrated on March 25th. How are we to find the point of transition if it keeps moving? And what do we do with a transition period, a middle, that takes up a thousand years? It's interesting that we often think of middle as center, as central. We often see those things on the periphery as less important. Yet in history as in our lives it's easy to see moments or years or centuries as simply between the real thing. Not only does this kind of thinking ignore realities of connection and continuity, but it denies the importance of the individual dots on the timeline.
On my trip home I spent some nice afternoons at the beach, visiting my much-missed Pacific Ocean, and I thought about how hard it often is to pinpoint a precise spot where one time or space ends and another begins. I walked through that tricky line on the shore where dry feet and wet feet are only moments apart, and I examined that strip of sand. What was above water one moment was below it the next, and even the extent to which the water reached was always different. The curved border between dry sand and wet sand (and even wetter sand) shifts constantly, and must be slightly different each day. Indeed, it must change throughout the day as well, and in more subtle ways than just the changing tides. As I rolled up my jeans and moved closer to the water, I noticed that the way the water moves over the sand is new each time, that the ripples of water are ever-changing and that they leave an imprint both of their shape and their substance on the sand behind them. As I tried to discern the line between the realms of ocean and sea, I found that there really is no simple answer. There is no line and there's always a line and there are a million different lines. I spoke in my paper at the recent NCS conference on the Man of Law's Tale about how the realms of land and sea are never as separate as they appear on the map, and it was good to actually look at the space between and in those realms. So often I find myself getting caught up in the theoretical. Of course I am a literature person -- examining texts is what I do. And I'm a medievalist -- thinking about things long ago is my job. But after writing so much about concepts of time and space and the ocean, it's good to get reacquainted with the ocean itself. To get my feet wet again, as it were.
On my trip I was reading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, and was struck by a passage from the preface to the 1961 edition describing how the floor of the deep sea "receives[s] sediments from the margins of the continents" such as "bits of wood and leaves, and … sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees" (x).The abyssal plains, therefore, include tangible pieces of the coast. And it is also the waters of the world that have carved out valleys and canyons now well above ground. Water has in many ways shaped our landscapes, just as the land provides the floor of our oceans and rivers. Carson explains of the ocean's formation that water wore away the land to create the ocean, while the minerals from these worn-away continents gave the sea its saltiness in "an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped" (7). In other words, the water continually shapes the land, while the land ceaselessly gives the ocean its salty form. Over the long history of the earth, land and sea have merged, shifted, and forged one another. Geological time, it seems, has its own ideas about topographical and temporal boundaries. To try to think of any particular space or time as its own separate entity really only works in a single instant. Even in that instant the lines are fraught, but only in that instant are lines really visible. Boundaries and borders are shifting, fleeting, intersecting. I played with this notion by snapping pictures of the space where ocean meets shore in order to try to capture some of those threshold moments. And even in my photographs, I cannot really tell for sure where water ends and sand begins. Can you?
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Musings on Trash and Treasure
As I mentioned in my last post, I had an absolutely amazing
time at the NCS conference in Portland last month. I was very excited to be a
part of the Animate Objects and Ecologies sessions helmed by Allan Mitchell,
and I found myself both delighted and deeply relieved that my paper was as
well-received as it was. As always, I was gifted with an array of deeply helpful feedback before and after the actual
presentation, and I came away from the experience both inspired and
encouraged in my work.
I was especially excited by the energy in the question and
answer portion of our session. It really
took the form of a lively conversation, which was pleasantly surprising in no
small part because of the early start time and the fact that Thursday was the
final day of the conference. Initially,
I had wondered how our papers would speak to one another. Siobhan Bly Calkin
was set to present on the holy lance of Antioch, Laura Diener on medieval
textiles, and I on Chaucerian images of books.
On the surface, the kinds of objects we planned to examine seemed to
have little in common, but as the session progressed it became very clear that
we were all speaking along uncannily convergent lines. Each of us, in our own ways, addressed issues
at the heart of the previous session devoted to animate objects. In particular, we ended up posing and
addressing questions similar to one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and others raised the day previously:
namely, what happens when objects don't behave the way that we expect or wish
them to?
There were an array of wonderful questions and comments made
throughout the remainder of our session that morning, but one in particular
really got me thinking, and I promised Kristi that I would write a small post
on it. Laura, at one point in our
conversation, asked how we humans wish to be remembered through the objects
that we leave behind, which made me think immediately of two things: 1. My
first job at a small archaeological firm in Williamsburg, Virginia, and 2. A wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet) by Mark Dion at the Tate Modern.
The first job that I ever had as a young person was at a
place called Cultural Resources, Inc. It's a small archaeological firm located in
Williamsburg, VA, and I was hired on to wash artifacts as they were brought in
from various dig sites around the state. It sounded incredibly glamorous and
Indiana Jones-ish at first, but the vast majority of time I washed bags of
nails and clay pipe bowls. I probably
washed thousands of nails that summer. Bags upon bags of old, rusted nails. My
days were filled with mud and weary iron. Finding a brightly colored pottery
shard amidst the sea of nails and pipe bowls was a special occasion. I became
deeply familiar with the contours, the shapes, and the smells of those broken
things. The vast majority of what I touched in that job, I discovered, came
from trash pits accidentally unearthed by contractors and builders around the
state. Whenever they dug into such a trash pit, which would have been filled
several centuries ago with items too broken for repair, all construction had to
stop until an archaeological firm could come in and exhume these items —items
that were once worthless but now had the opportunity to speak and, we hoped,
say something about where they came from.
 |
| Artifacts from a kitchen midden (i.e. trash pit) in Colonial Williamsburg. The blogger who snapped this image was informed by her guide on a tour of the Ravenscroft dig site that the midden was "the most helpful discovery at an archeological site like this . . . [because it] provide[d] a valuable indication of human settlement at a site." |
I do remember a
particularly eventful couple of months the summer following where we actually
handled a series of slave skeletons as they came to us from Fort A.P. Hill. The
soldiers there had been digging foxholes for some sort of drill and
accidentally unearthed an unmarked slave cemetery. Enter the crew from Cultural
Resources who, much to the consternation of those on base, kept finding
skeletons to exhume. Under normal
circumstances, the idea of touching and washing a human skull — let alone a
skull with a massive root creeping into its mouth and out of a right eye socket — would probably have horrified me. I was so tired of nails and pipe bowls,
however, that the obvious morbidity of the objects I had to handle didn't even
occur to me. I was simply thrilled have something different to handle. Even
when I had a child's skeleton completely disintegrate in my hands when I gently
released it from its wrappings. Even when I had to spend eight hours a day
under a constant stream of water, wood kebab stick and a toothbrush in hand, to
delicately remove the mud from the top surface of the bones. The only piece of the bone that is of value
and can reveal intricate medical details about the person who it once belonged
is that very top layer. Peel that away with the mud, and his or her story is lost.
This stint with the skeletons, however, was but a punctuation in my career of
artifact washing. The rest of the time was spent opening bags of trash-made-treasure,
washing it so that experts could analyze it.
I found the work simultaneously mundane and
fascinating. To be sure, washing
the same genus of artifact over and over again could get a bit dull. But even still, I would often find my mind wandering as I washed these
broken pieces, marveling over the fact that we now placed so much value in them
when they had been casually discarded centuries before. Looking back, I realize how deeply fortunate I was to have been able to work at this place for my very first job. How many other 15-year-olds get the chance to handle the past in such a way?
Fast-forward to the summer after my junior year in college. It had been at least three years since my
work at Cultural Resources. I was over
in London, spending some time exploring the city before beginning an abroad program in
Bath. I decided one day to explore the
Tate Modern for the first time, and I encountered -- among other fascinating installations -- Mark Dion's "Tate Thames Dig" (1999). It was a huge, double-sided cabinet with an array of small drawers on either side. Curiosity certainly got the better of me, and
I decided to investigate. Upon pulling open a drawer, I nearly laughed
out loud. There they were: rusted 17th or 18th century
nails, pipe bowls arranged by shape and hue, and pottery shards. I thought I'd escaped these
things -- I'm sure I had dreams of nails and pipes during those summers -- and
yet here they were, haunting me all the way over in England. I swung around to
the other side and opened a few of the drawers there to see what they
contained. One held an array of plastic bottle tops, arranged by color to
create a rainbow of detritus. Another was full of doll legs and arms. My
initial reading of this installation was that the one side contained 17th and 18th century trash
items, and that the other contained modern refuse, forming a kind of commentary
on the things that we value or devalue based on age, historical worth, etc. As
it turns out, however, the organizational methods for this installation are
more discursive. I recently learned that had I opened more of the drawers, I
would have found an overlap of time periods.
Dion deliberately kept himself from imposing too strict of an order on
the objects that he found along the Thames in order to allow viewers to form their own opinions about the objects he collected. My encounter with this installation, then, was one of
serendipitous selectivity, as the drawers I opened on either side formed
discrete divides between the old and the new, artifact and litter, treasure and
trash.
And now to fast-forward to the Animate Objects (Part the
Second) session at NCS. I brought both of these anecdotes up in response to
Laura’s question and proposed – through them –- a related but distinct query:
do we, in the end, actually have any control over the objects we leave behind and how they will
speak for us in the future? The answer
that springs from the anecdotes above seems to be no. I’m usually not in the business of making
broad claims about humanity (because
I typically have to convince undergraduate writers to do otherwise), but it
seems to me that a great many of us want desperately to be remembered, to live
on in the things (animate and inanimate, tangible and intangible) that we leave
behind. Achilles, after all, was said to have chosen a brutal death in his
youth so that he could enjoy that kind of eternal life. However, if Achilles existed at all, I doubt he
would have anticipated that his name is most often cited today not for his
martial feats in the killing fields along the Scamander, but as the name
of posterior leg tendon. He is remembered most for what killed
him, that small part of flesh covered by the hand of an overly-protective
goddess mother. I have little doubt that the Achilles we encounter in The Iliad would have chosen a different
legacy for himself if given the opportunity. In like fashion, though we create
so many beautiful things on this earth, the majority of what we leave behind,
and what we risk being remembered by, is waste. A few hundred years from now,
that is what archeologists will be digging up in abundance. To be sure, objects
of special beauty and intricacy will have priority as they do today in places
like Cultural Resources, but those objects come along so very rarely. More than
likely, they will work (as we do today) with the fragmented detritus of an
older time and try, as best they can, to riddle meanings out of it all.
 |
Thursday, August 16, 2012
NCS: A Belated Retrospectve
It’s been a long, long while since I contributed to this blog, and as a result I'm a bit backlogged with things I want to post! Since my last substantial entry, I finished my dissertation, defended in April, and moved to California just two days after graduation in May. Between all of that, continuing to teach online, and wrist surgery (Part the First took place in early July, and Part the Second just two days ago), life has definitely been at its busiest! I have, at regular intervals, kind of felt like this guy:
Since May, I’ve been laboring away on the first of a few retrospectives on my time in Rochester, a task that is proving more challenging than I’d anticipated. I will post it eventually, but in the meantime, I’m going to start contributing again with entries that behave themselves more immediately!
The NCS conference proved to be just that. I arrived in Portland very worn out from the transitioning, the surgery, a variety of other stressors, and – I’ll admit it –the mad rush to write a conference paper that made sense to someone outside of my own head. As soon as the conference began, however, I started to feel a bit more like my old self. Reuniting with friends and making new ones, wandering around an unfamiliar city of impossibly friendly people, eating excellent food (good lord, Voodoo Donuts!!) and enjoying an array of deeply meaningful conversations certainly buoyed my spirits. And the sessions themselves were truly innervating -– I don’t know when I’ve been to a conference so rich and alive with ideas and collaborative spirit.
.jpg)
One of the many things I love about NCS is its structure. The thematic threads were new to me back in Siena (my first NCS conference, and what a conference it was!!), and I do love their effect –- the way in which they organically encourage extended explorations and conversations. I found the threads this year especially cohesive and in alignment with one another. Papers spoke to each other across sessions in the most serendipitous of ways, and on more than one occasion I found myself so innervated by the energy of a session that I couldn’t wait to get back to writing and to research -– a feeling I had truly begun to miss. The transcendently insane pre-dissertation-filing extravaganza had burned that fire down to a fairly decrepit pile of embers (20 hours a day of editing, as well as deciding, in a fit of madness, to read your entire dissertation out loud to yourself in order to catch all of your typos will certainly do that!). I was so relieved, as a result, to feel my old enthusiasms returning.
.jpg)
I attended a number of compelling sessions and could very easily devote an entire post to each of them! I will, in the meantime, touch on some of the highlights. My conferencing began with the Gender and Race panel, and I was absolutely fascinated by Chris Chism’s paper on Mandeville. She focused on two particular episodes -- one involving a king's dragon-daughter and another involving a sparrow hawk –- to point out the alternative and more peaceable modes of Othering that the Mandeville-author puts forward. Listening to her careful interpretation and contextualization of these episodes really brought home to me the importance of balancing what I like to call 'expansive and contractive reading.' It’s actually an extension of a lesson I learned in Shotokan karate –- the idea being that there are times in one’s training where you have to focus carefully on a single area of your karate in order to improve it (i.e. contractive), and other times where you need to paint with broader brush strokes, taking in large swathes of kinesthetic information all at once(i.e. expansive). It’s the difference between correcting your foot positioning in back-stance, for instance, versus memorizing all of the movements of a kata so that you can begin to work on it at a deeper level. To tie this back to Mandeville, what struck me so much about Chism's paper was how it offered a reading of conversion and conquest in Mandeville that was both aligned but vibrantly distinct from my own argument that I made in my dissertation. I focused on the matter of conversion in the text as well, but by focusing squarely on the objects of potential conversion (Jews, Saracens, and Mongols as they appear in the text), I overlooked the anecdotes that she explored in such marvelous detail; and as she revealed in her paper, those portions of Mandeville actually had much to say about the very topics and issues I saw explored in other sections of the text. I was so grateful for her paper as a result, because it reminded me, among many other things, to widen the lens as I work on Mandeville in the future.
The rest of the papers in this session, including one by our fellow UofR compatriot Sharon Rhodes, were wonderfully strong and interconnected as well. I absolutely loved the fact that the papers were split evenly between Old and Middle English texts and yet remained strongly conversant with one another. Sharon's uncannily apt evocation of The Knight's Tale at the end of her paper, in fact, served as a perfect transition from Old to Middle English in the session. A question arose, however, in the Q&A over the panelists’ lack of high theory in their work. It was certainly true that none of the panelists referred to theorists by name or imposed stark and visible theoretical frameworks around their arguments. I honestly didn’t find any of their papers lacking because of this, but rather saw each panelist explore in nuanced and implicit ways how the texts they focused upon grappled with the ideas of liminality, with the limits of human control (cognitive and otherwise), and with a variety of ontological cruxes about the ocean. I’m not saying that the question was illegitimate by any stretch, but at the same time, I wondered whether it was entirely fair to imply that these papers were potentially lacking because they didn’t feel the need to evoke high theory directly. The speakers, however, did a more than thorough job of gracefully defending their approaches, and that in and of itself was a pleasure to see. By the end of the exchange, in fact, I had the sneaking suspicion that those responses were exactly what the questioner wished to elicit, because he seemed –- at least as far as I could tell – rather satisfied with their responses.
.jpg)
Being on its sister panel, I all too happily attended the roundtable devoted to animate objects and ecologies, and I found myself thrilled by the energy (dare I say animation?) of both the presenters and the audience. It was the last session of the day, but the room was filled to the brim. The panelists spoke on all manner of “things”: divine and secular objects, books, straw, eel traps, color, and stained glass, to name but a few. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen kicked things off by discussing “prismatic ecologies,” posing the question of whether color "possesses an agency that's useful to think with.” He presented the audience with three images that were at once distinct and convergent. The first was a c. 1375 image of an artist preparing colors with which to paint. The image, as Cohen observed, highlights the fact that color is a “thing made of other things.” The second image was a 2012 art installation dated by John Ryan. It is, to put it most simply (and to do it no real justice), a large glob of paint on a white canvas. Cohen observed, however, that by being as minimalistic and “hands off” with the paint as it is, this piece allows color to possess a dignity of its own. As a result, color is allowed to become something autonomous. Finally, Cohen showed us an image of the River Thames and presented it a kind of sculptor. Through this brief survey of images, Cohen advocated for a multi-hued avenue by which we might begin to approach and consider inanimate objects on their own terms. As always, I was struck by Cohen’s ability to take seemingly disparate objects and concepts and demonstrate their synchronicity, a talent that allowed his paper to become prismatic in and of itself.
The other papers in this roundtable were equally enervating – from Alexandra Gillespie's lively exploration of straw (bookmarks?) in medieval manuscripts, to Anne Harris’s examination of stained glass and its multihued implications, to Myra Seaman’s exploration of how we “reckon” with objects deemed divine. The entire roundtable, ultimately, revolved around that question the lies at the heart of object oriented ontology -- namely, what happens when we make ourselves willing to deprioritize human agency? What happens, in other words, when we allow objects an opportunity to misbehave? This idea arose with Mary Kate Hurley's observation that each of the papers dealt in some way with the idea of objects as mediators and with the idea of mediation itself. Her comment, and Cohen’s response -- that these panels on objects are in some ways designed to figure out what the objects want, and that we have begun to ask why objects do not always “mediate so compliantly” -- would in many ways anticipate the conversation that would continue in the second animate ecology session the following day, one that I felt very fortunate to be a part of.
To that end, I approached my own session with a nervousness that surprised me at first – that is, until I reminded myself that I was speaking on a topic that was incredibly new to me, a topic that couldn't be further away from the material I'd spent the last several years developing into my dissertation. I viewed the paper as an opportunity and as a challenge to myself -- as a way of remembering, among other things, that I could (and should!) talk about things aside from the Crusades from time to time. I'll confess that when I arrived in Portland the day before the conference, I was still rather uncertain about the merits of what I was saying in my paper. I felt dangerously far out in left field. I also worried about having to wait until the last day to present. Truthfully, however, presenting on that final day was the best thing that could have possibly happened. It gave me an opportunity to listen carefully to the conversations that were going on all around me throughout the week, and I even found ways of incorporating and responding to some of them in my paper -- something I had never had the opportunity to do before this conference. Watching the array of excellent presentations throughout the week, moreover, both inspired me and reminded me of a very simple fact: that we gather together in these places to share ideas both fresh and mature, both established and speculative -- that all are welcome.
I’ll save the details of the session I was a part of for part two of this post (which will be up and running by Saturday, I think). I'll close for now by expressing my profound gratitude for the many wonderful encounters I had at this conference. Highlights included being introduced to the fantastic fantasy section of Powell’s (and to the Prester John series by Catherynne M. Valente) by a scholar whose generosity and kindness know no bounds, pretending – with some fellow mischief-makers -- to ignite one anti-medieval tome by way of another (see the adjacent photo), getting encouraging feedback on my book project, and, most of all, enjoying the many opportunities I had to reconnect with so many of my old friends from Rochester. We had a large contingency at the conference this year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some quality time with each of the folks who attended. One of my favorite and most vivid images of the conference, moreover, was of the banquet. The hum of enthused voices created a din that you had to shout over, and seeing so many people reconnecting with one another – catching glimpses of friendships that must be on their third or fourth decade in some cases – made me so very grateful. I realized, as I looked up from my table where all of my dear friends sat to the numerous other tables filled with similar reunions, that we will always find ways back into each other's lives, and that we have many more adventures to come.
Since May, I’ve been laboring away on the first of a few retrospectives on my time in Rochester, a task that is proving more challenging than I’d anticipated. I will post it eventually, but in the meantime, I’m going to start contributing again with entries that behave themselves more immediately!
Excited as I was to make the move out to California, leaving Rochester was incredibly hard. I went to college in the same town where I attended high school, and so the move to graduate school was the first one that I made completely on my own terms. Rochester was the place where I met many of my closest friends, where I got engaged, and where, in many respects, I really began to come into my own. California has certainly treated me very well so far -- and I cannot express how grateful I am to be living in the same house with my husband again! -- but the magnitude of everything I left behind has had me feeling more than a little displaced these past few months. It’s a feeling I know and understand having grown up in a military family, but I found myself nevertheless needing something to boost my spirits -– something to help me reconnect with the things I love in the midst of newness and uncertainty.
The NCS conference proved to be just that. I arrived in Portland very worn out from the transitioning, the surgery, a variety of other stressors, and – I’ll admit it –the mad rush to write a conference paper that made sense to someone outside of my own head. As soon as the conference began, however, I started to feel a bit more like my old self. Reuniting with friends and making new ones, wandering around an unfamiliar city of impossibly friendly people, eating excellent food (good lord, Voodoo Donuts!!) and enjoying an array of deeply meaningful conversations certainly buoyed my spirits. And the sessions themselves were truly innervating -– I don’t know when I’ve been to a conference so rich and alive with ideas and collaborative spirit. .jpg)
One of the many things I love about NCS is its structure. The thematic threads were new to me back in Siena (my first NCS conference, and what a conference it was!!), and I do love their effect –- the way in which they organically encourage extended explorations and conversations. I found the threads this year especially cohesive and in alignment with one another. Papers spoke to each other across sessions in the most serendipitous of ways, and on more than one occasion I found myself so innervated by the energy of a session that I couldn’t wait to get back to writing and to research -– a feeling I had truly begun to miss. The transcendently insane pre-dissertation-filing extravaganza had burned that fire down to a fairly decrepit pile of embers (20 hours a day of editing, as well as deciding, in a fit of madness, to read your entire dissertation out loud to yourself in order to catch all of your typos will certainly do that!). I was so relieved, as a result, to feel my old enthusiasms returning..jpg)
I also enjoyed the Ocean Translations session tremendously, in no small part because my inimitable co-blogger (who has, I’d like to add, done an impossibly amazing job at keeping this blog alive while I’ve been digging myself out of the insanity of the past several months!) gave a fantastic paper on The Man of Law’s Tale. I honestly cannot think about MoL, Custance, or, even more broadly,“women who float in boats” (her words) without thinking immediately of Kristi. I’ve heard her present on Custance many times, and I was especially struck this time around by her observation that oceans function as “containers of history” in MoL. She explored the wide array of allusions to Biblical narrative that appear in the passages describing Custance’s rudderless boat rides, and argued convincingly that these ocean passages and the analogies within them serve as a human attempt to connect the land (the containable) with the ocean (the uncontainable).
The rest of the papers in this session, including one by our fellow UofR compatriot Sharon Rhodes, were wonderfully strong and interconnected as well. I absolutely loved the fact that the papers were split evenly between Old and Middle English texts and yet remained strongly conversant with one another. Sharon's uncannily apt evocation of The Knight's Tale at the end of her paper, in fact, served as a perfect transition from Old to Middle English in the session. A question arose, however, in the Q&A over the panelists’ lack of high theory in their work. It was certainly true that none of the panelists referred to theorists by name or imposed stark and visible theoretical frameworks around their arguments. I honestly didn’t find any of their papers lacking because of this, but rather saw each panelist explore in nuanced and implicit ways how the texts they focused upon grappled with the ideas of liminality, with the limits of human control (cognitive and otherwise), and with a variety of ontological cruxes about the ocean. I’m not saying that the question was illegitimate by any stretch, but at the same time, I wondered whether it was entirely fair to imply that these papers were potentially lacking because they didn’t feel the need to evoke high theory directly. The speakers, however, did a more than thorough job of gracefully defending their approaches, and that in and of itself was a pleasure to see. By the end of the exchange, in fact, I had the sneaking suspicion that those responses were exactly what the questioner wished to elicit, because he seemed –- at least as far as I could tell – rather satisfied with their responses.
The following day found me at the session entitled “Legal and Literary Forests in Late-Medieval Britain.” My good friend Valerie Johnson presented on The Manciple’s Tale and argued persuasively for a reading of the forest as an ecological threshold — as “a signal to read the text as a political tale.” Also on the panel was Karl Steel, who gave a lively presentation on deer carcasses and their legal and symbolic implications (you can find a full version of his paper here). As I listened to his paper, I was particularly struck by his statement that “inanimate objects are forceful entities,” because it resonated with my argument about books in Chaucer’s poetry, and would also anticipate many of the arguments made throughout the sessions devoted to animate ecologies. Moreover, the conversation that developed in the Q&A period following these papers was especially inspiring. I appreciated, in particular, the brief discussion on semantics that arose out of Karl's paper. Is short, one audience member asked about Karl's use of the word “intention.” What resulted was a lively and encouraging offering up of alternatives (agency, direction, propulsion), with additional comments on the implications of each option made along the way. I found this moment absolutely delightful, because it highlighted the devotion that we all share for words -- the fact that we all, by becoming literary scholars, become poets as well, treating each word that we include in a given paper with incredible care.
.jpg)
The conversation continued with Rebecca Davis and Laura Farina both discussing aspects of The House of Fame. Davis explored how the text describes objects that contain other objects; she used the terminology of hoarding in an incredibly useful way to explain how this poem presents a kind of conservation that “depends on ceaseless movement and recombination.” Farina took a different approach by exploring “impersonal affect” in The House of Fame. Like Davis, she observed that the poem is full of “stuff made of other stuff,” but she approached the over-stimulation that the narrator experiences through, in part, the lens of autism, drawing on Temple Grandin’s concept of the squeezebox to explain the narrator’s sensations and experiences in the dream vision. In the end, both of these papers offered up ways of engaging the so-called “vibrant matter” in the poem, and I was fascinated by how they both spoke so directly to one another while also taking such markedly different approaches.
The other papers in this roundtable were equally enervating – from Alexandra Gillespie's lively exploration of straw (bookmarks?) in medieval manuscripts, to Anne Harris’s examination of stained glass and its multihued implications, to Myra Seaman’s exploration of how we “reckon” with objects deemed divine. The entire roundtable, ultimately, revolved around that question the lies at the heart of object oriented ontology -- namely, what happens when we make ourselves willing to deprioritize human agency? What happens, in other words, when we allow objects an opportunity to misbehave? This idea arose with Mary Kate Hurley's observation that each of the papers dealt in some way with the idea of objects as mediators and with the idea of mediation itself. Her comment, and Cohen’s response -- that these panels on objects are in some ways designed to figure out what the objects want, and that we have begun to ask why objects do not always “mediate so compliantly” -- would in many ways anticipate the conversation that would continue in the second animate ecology session the following day, one that I felt very fortunate to be a part of. 
To that end, I approached my own session with a nervousness that surprised me at first – that is, until I reminded myself that I was speaking on a topic that was incredibly new to me, a topic that couldn't be further away from the material I'd spent the last several years developing into my dissertation. I viewed the paper as an opportunity and as a challenge to myself -- as a way of remembering, among other things, that I could (and should!) talk about things aside from the Crusades from time to time. I'll confess that when I arrived in Portland the day before the conference, I was still rather uncertain about the merits of what I was saying in my paper. I felt dangerously far out in left field. I also worried about having to wait until the last day to present. Truthfully, however, presenting on that final day was the best thing that could have possibly happened. It gave me an opportunity to listen carefully to the conversations that were going on all around me throughout the week, and I even found ways of incorporating and responding to some of them in my paper -- something I had never had the opportunity to do before this conference. Watching the array of excellent presentations throughout the week, moreover, both inspired me and reminded me of a very simple fact: that we gather together in these places to share ideas both fresh and mature, both established and speculative -- that all are welcome. 
I’ll save the details of the session I was a part of for part two of this post (which will be up and running by Saturday, I think). I'll close for now by expressing my profound gratitude for the many wonderful encounters I had at this conference. Highlights included being introduced to the fantastic fantasy section of Powell’s (and to the Prester John series by Catherynne M. Valente) by a scholar whose generosity and kindness know no bounds, pretending – with some fellow mischief-makers -- to ignite one anti-medieval tome by way of another (see the adjacent photo), getting encouraging feedback on my book project, and, most of all, enjoying the many opportunities I had to reconnect with so many of my old friends from Rochester. We had a large contingency at the conference this year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some quality time with each of the folks who attended. One of my favorite and most vivid images of the conference, moreover, was of the banquet. The hum of enthused voices created a din that you had to shout over, and seeing so many people reconnecting with one another – catching glimpses of friendships that must be on their third or fourth decade in some cases – made me so very grateful. I realized, as I looked up from my table where all of my dear friends sat to the numerous other tables filled with similar reunions, that we will always find ways back into each other's lives, and that we have many more adventures to come. 
To be sure, an outsider could look at this conference, or any other that we frequent, and see only a place for "making contacts" and/or for demonstrating one’s worth in the field. For me and for so many others, however, these conferences are opportunities to forge meaningful connections with people who are as crazily passionate as we are about certain aspects of the world. Conferences as electric as this one, in other words, invite us to commune with one another -- to recognize that we are all, however different our methodologies, striving to read the world, the creatures that populate it, and the texts we encounter along the way in fresh and innovative lights.
So, here’s to a delightful week in Portland (I raise a glass with my non-gimpy hand)! I am already looking forward with enthusiasm to our reunion in 2014 -- in elf-inhabited Iceland, no less!
Thursday, August 2, 2012
On Time and the Garden
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
When I consider how my light is spent
It's been a while since I've posted. Although the summer is the time in the academic calendar when the teaching load subsides and writing can take place, I've had some trouble writing so far this summer. I took on too many side projects in June. Meant to be small jobs to earn some summer income, these projects ended up sapping up my time and creative energy. As I enter July, I'm trying to refocus. I'm trying to capture some quite moments. I'm trying to figure out what I think and what I want to say. I need to make significant progress on my dissertation this summer, and I need to learn to allow myself that time. For now, I'm posting some pictures I've taken this summer of light(s) in various forms.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
A Trip to the Zoo (or, Is it still called sailing if you don't have a sail?)
I just returned from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I attended this year's fabulous International Congress on Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo (or, as we medievalists fondly call it, "the zoo") has become an annual pilgrimage for me, a time of year as sure as spring, when a caravan of cars from Rochester heads across the midwest to a magical place where people who study the Middle Ages feel for a few days a year like we might actually make up a significant portion of the population. This was my sixth year going and my fifth year presenting; I've enjoyed it each time, but this year I really felt at home. I'm becoming increasingly relaxed at this conference, which can be a bit overwhelming at first. Made up of scholars from a variety of disciplines, around 3,000 people from around the world attend the congress. I saw some great papers, had some wonderful conversations, and got to catch up with friends old and new. My panel, on "Women and their Environments: Real and Imagined" and sponsored by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, worked beautifully as a whole. The papers moved us from cityscape to forest to ocean in the course of the panel. (For a fascinating discussion of female bodies and landscape, see Kate's recent post on Perceval of Galles.) I came back with pages of notes to fuel my chapter, and am feeling reinvigorated after a long semester/year. Once again, I feel lucky to be in a field with such smart and engaging and generous scholars.
Since I just gave a paper on Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale at Kalamazoo, and I'll be giving another paper on the same tale for the New Chaucer Society later this summer in Portland, Oregon, I thought I'd write a little about the tale and my experience of it. This post combines random musings with pieces from the paper I just gave, the one I'll give this July, and the chapter in progress. For those of you who need a little refresher, the tale is about Custance, a saintly Roman Princess. She first travels east to marry the Sultan of Syria, who's converted for her love, but her new mother-in-law isn't pleased with the plan and sets her to sea in a rudderless ship. Finally reaching Northumbria, she manages to convert and marry the king there (she has a real talent for looking pretty enough to convert any world leader she encounters). But she once again lands herself an evil mother-in-law. This mother-in-law also sends our heroine on a rudderless ship, but this time she makes it back to Rome. Her royal husband also travels to Rome on pilgrimage, and a happy reunion can occur. This brief summary leaves our many important details, but it will do for now. The tale is part of a larger tradition of Constance narratives which feature the same basic story line, though with important distinctions.
The Man of Law's Tale is the most famous Middle English iteration of the rudderless ship tales, and also the most famous of the tales in the so-called Constance-Cycle, so I knew that I would have to tackle it in my dissertation. I found this task daunting for multiple reasons. First, it's Chaucer. There's just so much criticism to contend with. At least it's not the Wife of Bath or the Pardoner but it's still breathtaking to consider how many people have read and written on this story and on The Canterbury Tales more generally. Second, I really didn't know what to do with this tale. I had already figured out my arguments about Gower's version, which features a much more assertive Constance. The Man of Law seems intent on downplaying Custance's free will and in giving her as little agency as possible. I just didn't know what I was going to say beyond contrasting this Constance with other, spunkier Constances, and that didn't seem particularly interesting or original. So I put off this chapter as long as I could.
Last year I included the Man of Law's Tale in my course on Medieval travel, and teaching the tale helped me to see it in a new way. Re-reading a text in order to teach it and discussing it with students who've never before encountered it always helps me to see it anew. I was also really fascinated by the reactions my students had to Custance. I've taught the Wife of Bath's Tale several times now, and I've come to expect strong responses from students to the Wife. I really didn't expect Custance to elicit those kinds of emotions. But the students did respond, to both the story and to its heroine. There were students who, like me, were annoyed by Custance's passivity. But others found in her a role model, a person strong and confident in herself and her beliefs. It was quite a diverse group, especially the first semester I taught it, with people from a variety of countries and religious backgrounds, and there were about the same number of males and females in the class. Two of the students who identified most strongly with Custance, who found in her a role model for themselves, were male. They were both people of faith, but people from very different religious backgrounds, and they saw in her characteristics that they felt all people should strive to possess. These passionate responses made me take a step back and reassess the character. This is not to say that I don't think Custance's faith is gendered or that it doesn't take on specific meanings in the context of the period or of The Canterbury Tales, but rather that there might simply be aspects of it that I hadn't considered. I began to think about other features of the tale that I might have missed.
During this time, I was developing my overarching argument about the ocean in the mappae mundi (which you can find more on here and here), and increasingly noticing how blank and marginal a space it was in these maps, on the fringes of the text-covered landscape. The land is history, both linear and cyclical, while the ocean shapes history and yet remains outside of it. Given these features of the mappae mundi, I began to notice something about the oceanic moments of the tale. On Custance's rudderless voyages, the Man of Law makes sense of her survival by comparing her to a litany of Biblical figures. If we wonder how she survives, we might ask who saved Daniel in the lion's den, who saved Jonah from the Whale, and a quite extensive number of similar questions. These long digressions of comparisons to Biblical figures, which I had found frustrating before, suddenly took a new meaning for me. I had really only thought about how they downplayed Custance's free-will, and that's certainly true, but perhaps something else is going on as well in these lengthy interruptions. If the ocean is extrahistorical, then what do we make of all of these comparisons to figures and events who belong in the historical, landed realm?
There is some precedence for seeing Custance's story in terms of medieval cartography. V.A. Kolve notes in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative that "the tale creates a residual image that is geographical: a map of Europe with a boat moving upon its waters" (319). Kathy Lavezzo expands this notion in Angels on the Edge of the World by arguing that "since Custance's journey begins in Syria, the cartographic territory evoked in the tale in fact extends beyond Europe and [. . .] suggests a map of the world" (95). David Raybin (who was actually at my talk and who gave me extensive and helpful feedback) joins Custance's geographical marginality with history and time in "Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." He notes that "[s]he is exiled from the temporal world and thus unconstrained by time, bound to her faith and thus spiritually free, existing in an emblematic position largely outside of human contact, outside history" (69). All of these scholars have made fascinating and apt arguments about Custance, about her placement in the world. I would like to combine the cartographic discussions of Kolve and Lavezzo with Raybin's ideas about Custance's temporal marginalization, and put all of these in terms of the oceanic spaces of the tale. I want to consider the ocean in the tale as a complex kind of narrative space.
Custance's initial voyage to Syria is barely described. She has a clear destination and a clear purpose (and, presumably, a mode of steering). This trip seems to occur squarely in the historical realm. Her subsequent sea voyages are quite different. Pushed into a rudderless ship and sent into the sea, Custance enters a different kind of narrative space, once in which her prayers and her constant faith can serve her well. Unlike the voyage to Syria, her latter travels occur in a zone outside of history and narrative control. The "salte see" becomes a realm dominated by fate. Only Custance, constant as she is, could survive such a voyage in the oceanic realm. She sails without destination or control. The narrator explains that her boat goes "Som-tyme West, som-tyme North and South,/ And som-tyme Est, ful many a wery day" (948-949). Each cardinal direction is given its turn, making this journey one that can be mapped and yet also one that cannot. We know that the ship takes each direction, so directions are available, which seems more like the real ocean than the circle around the mappae mundi. Yet the fact that the boat takes each direction at will and we never know quite where we are leads us to that metaphorical realm. Nor is time less fluid than location. The ship is carried back and forth across the ocean for "Yeres and dayes," a time that seems specific, with the addition of days, and yet is nonetheless vague (463). How many years? How many days? Time, it seems, is hard to quantify on the waves. The precise way in which the events of the tale up to this point have been recounted gives way to a rise and fall of detail in keeping with the movement of the ocean itself. On our heroine's second "stereless" voyage the time is somewhat clearer -- "Fyve yeer and more" (902). We do get a number of years this time, but the "and more" undoes that specificity. Temporalities and teleologies and cycles are all lost amid the waves.
Yet the Man of Law must somehow narrate this "stereless" section of the tale, and he does so by connecting Custance's situation with biblical figures who also survived certain death in the form of natural adversaries. As soon as Custance is afloat at sea, outside of the historical realm and in that blank space off the charted map, the Man of Law begins to make connections between our heroine and the sort of men and women who routinely show up on the landed areas of the map. The Man of Law can only make sense of Custance's foray outside of the historical realm by relating it back to that realm in every way possible. He tells us about how Daniel survived the lion's den, Jonah made it out of the whale's belly, the Hebrews passed through the water thanks to the parting of the waves. The comparisons go on for some time, but I would like to consider the fact that these last two, Jonah and the Red Sea, are watery comparisons. While the ocean comparisons may seem fitting to the ocean realm, I would argue that they remain a part of the historical narrative, the kind that was not written into the oceans of the mappae mundi. By mentioning them here, the Man of Law is simultaneously pulling Custance back into the historical realm and marking the ocean as a space that has contained human history. It is a means of inscribing these events onto the ocean, as so many events were written onto the landscape in medieval world maps.
I argue that these comparisons, extensive and disruptive as they are, serve to reconnect the ocean and land, to renegotiate the tensions involved in a narrative outside of the historical realm. Custance, passive as she is, makes a central and historical narrative out of a blank marginal space. Her story doubles back on itself in the course of her tale; everything occurs more than once, indicating a kind of cyclical history, and yet, as Suzanne Conklin Akbari has noted in a recent talk at the University of Rochester, the story denies us either a complete cycle or a complete teleology. It is both cyclical and linear and it is neither. It moves in and out of historical time, and never allows Custance, or the reader, a clear footing in either realm. The heroine's movements around the earth in her rudderless ship unsettle boundaries and binaries of time and space even as they assert them. The ocean is both vital and distant, encompassing land masses but existing beyond and outside of those realms. It serves as a threshold to other lands, and yet is a distinct conduit, unlike a road, which is built into the land itself. As a conduit not created by humans, it is far more threatening and unpredictable. Because of its placement on mappae mundi, it also exists outside of history, functioning as an extrahistorical realm. Custance’s oceanic travels thus represent a new kind of storytelling that is – like the ocean – a threshold, a liminal space between kinds of narratives. The realms of land and sea, and the types of narratives embodied by each, are not as separate as they might appear on the map; likewise, modes of narrative production intersect in dynamic ways throughout the tale and allow for the passive Custance to reshape the religio-cultural contours of her world.
Since I just gave a paper on Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale at Kalamazoo, and I'll be giving another paper on the same tale for the New Chaucer Society later this summer in Portland, Oregon, I thought I'd write a little about the tale and my experience of it. This post combines random musings with pieces from the paper I just gave, the one I'll give this July, and the chapter in progress. For those of you who need a little refresher, the tale is about Custance, a saintly Roman Princess. She first travels east to marry the Sultan of Syria, who's converted for her love, but her new mother-in-law isn't pleased with the plan and sets her to sea in a rudderless ship. Finally reaching Northumbria, she manages to convert and marry the king there (she has a real talent for looking pretty enough to convert any world leader she encounters). But she once again lands herself an evil mother-in-law. This mother-in-law also sends our heroine on a rudderless ship, but this time she makes it back to Rome. Her royal husband also travels to Rome on pilgrimage, and a happy reunion can occur. This brief summary leaves our many important details, but it will do for now. The tale is part of a larger tradition of Constance narratives which feature the same basic story line, though with important distinctions.
The Man of Law's Tale is the most famous Middle English iteration of the rudderless ship tales, and also the most famous of the tales in the so-called Constance-Cycle, so I knew that I would have to tackle it in my dissertation. I found this task daunting for multiple reasons. First, it's Chaucer. There's just so much criticism to contend with. At least it's not the Wife of Bath or the Pardoner but it's still breathtaking to consider how many people have read and written on this story and on The Canterbury Tales more generally. Second, I really didn't know what to do with this tale. I had already figured out my arguments about Gower's version, which features a much more assertive Constance. The Man of Law seems intent on downplaying Custance's free will and in giving her as little agency as possible. I just didn't know what I was going to say beyond contrasting this Constance with other, spunkier Constances, and that didn't seem particularly interesting or original. So I put off this chapter as long as I could.
Last year I included the Man of Law's Tale in my course on Medieval travel, and teaching the tale helped me to see it in a new way. Re-reading a text in order to teach it and discussing it with students who've never before encountered it always helps me to see it anew. I was also really fascinated by the reactions my students had to Custance. I've taught the Wife of Bath's Tale several times now, and I've come to expect strong responses from students to the Wife. I really didn't expect Custance to elicit those kinds of emotions. But the students did respond, to both the story and to its heroine. There were students who, like me, were annoyed by Custance's passivity. But others found in her a role model, a person strong and confident in herself and her beliefs. It was quite a diverse group, especially the first semester I taught it, with people from a variety of countries and religious backgrounds, and there were about the same number of males and females in the class. Two of the students who identified most strongly with Custance, who found in her a role model for themselves, were male. They were both people of faith, but people from very different religious backgrounds, and they saw in her characteristics that they felt all people should strive to possess. These passionate responses made me take a step back and reassess the character. This is not to say that I don't think Custance's faith is gendered or that it doesn't take on specific meanings in the context of the period or of The Canterbury Tales, but rather that there might simply be aspects of it that I hadn't considered. I began to think about other features of the tale that I might have missed.
During this time, I was developing my overarching argument about the ocean in the mappae mundi (which you can find more on here and here), and increasingly noticing how blank and marginal a space it was in these maps, on the fringes of the text-covered landscape. The land is history, both linear and cyclical, while the ocean shapes history and yet remains outside of it. Given these features of the mappae mundi, I began to notice something about the oceanic moments of the tale. On Custance's rudderless voyages, the Man of Law makes sense of her survival by comparing her to a litany of Biblical figures. If we wonder how she survives, we might ask who saved Daniel in the lion's den, who saved Jonah from the Whale, and a quite extensive number of similar questions. These long digressions of comparisons to Biblical figures, which I had found frustrating before, suddenly took a new meaning for me. I had really only thought about how they downplayed Custance's free-will, and that's certainly true, but perhaps something else is going on as well in these lengthy interruptions. If the ocean is extrahistorical, then what do we make of all of these comparisons to figures and events who belong in the historical, landed realm?
There is some precedence for seeing Custance's story in terms of medieval cartography. V.A. Kolve notes in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative that "the tale creates a residual image that is geographical: a map of Europe with a boat moving upon its waters" (319). Kathy Lavezzo expands this notion in Angels on the Edge of the World by arguing that "since Custance's journey begins in Syria, the cartographic territory evoked in the tale in fact extends beyond Europe and [. . .] suggests a map of the world" (95). David Raybin (who was actually at my talk and who gave me extensive and helpful feedback) joins Custance's geographical marginality with history and time in "Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." He notes that "[s]he is exiled from the temporal world and thus unconstrained by time, bound to her faith and thus spiritually free, existing in an emblematic position largely outside of human contact, outside history" (69). All of these scholars have made fascinating and apt arguments about Custance, about her placement in the world. I would like to combine the cartographic discussions of Kolve and Lavezzo with Raybin's ideas about Custance's temporal marginalization, and put all of these in terms of the oceanic spaces of the tale. I want to consider the ocean in the tale as a complex kind of narrative space.
Custance's initial voyage to Syria is barely described. She has a clear destination and a clear purpose (and, presumably, a mode of steering). This trip seems to occur squarely in the historical realm. Her subsequent sea voyages are quite different. Pushed into a rudderless ship and sent into the sea, Custance enters a different kind of narrative space, once in which her prayers and her constant faith can serve her well. Unlike the voyage to Syria, her latter travels occur in a zone outside of history and narrative control. The "salte see" becomes a realm dominated by fate. Only Custance, constant as she is, could survive such a voyage in the oceanic realm. She sails without destination or control. The narrator explains that her boat goes "Som-tyme West, som-tyme North and South,/ And som-tyme Est, ful many a wery day" (948-949). Each cardinal direction is given its turn, making this journey one that can be mapped and yet also one that cannot. We know that the ship takes each direction, so directions are available, which seems more like the real ocean than the circle around the mappae mundi. Yet the fact that the boat takes each direction at will and we never know quite where we are leads us to that metaphorical realm. Nor is time less fluid than location. The ship is carried back and forth across the ocean for "Yeres and dayes," a time that seems specific, with the addition of days, and yet is nonetheless vague (463). How many years? How many days? Time, it seems, is hard to quantify on the waves. The precise way in which the events of the tale up to this point have been recounted gives way to a rise and fall of detail in keeping with the movement of the ocean itself. On our heroine's second "stereless" voyage the time is somewhat clearer -- "Fyve yeer and more" (902). We do get a number of years this time, but the "and more" undoes that specificity. Temporalities and teleologies and cycles are all lost amid the waves.
Yet the Man of Law must somehow narrate this "stereless" section of the tale, and he does so by connecting Custance's situation with biblical figures who also survived certain death in the form of natural adversaries. As soon as Custance is afloat at sea, outside of the historical realm and in that blank space off the charted map, the Man of Law begins to make connections between our heroine and the sort of men and women who routinely show up on the landed areas of the map. The Man of Law can only make sense of Custance's foray outside of the historical realm by relating it back to that realm in every way possible. He tells us about how Daniel survived the lion's den, Jonah made it out of the whale's belly, the Hebrews passed through the water thanks to the parting of the waves. The comparisons go on for some time, but I would like to consider the fact that these last two, Jonah and the Red Sea, are watery comparisons. While the ocean comparisons may seem fitting to the ocean realm, I would argue that they remain a part of the historical narrative, the kind that was not written into the oceans of the mappae mundi. By mentioning them here, the Man of Law is simultaneously pulling Custance back into the historical realm and marking the ocean as a space that has contained human history. It is a means of inscribing these events onto the ocean, as so many events were written onto the landscape in medieval world maps.
I argue that these comparisons, extensive and disruptive as they are, serve to reconnect the ocean and land, to renegotiate the tensions involved in a narrative outside of the historical realm. Custance, passive as she is, makes a central and historical narrative out of a blank marginal space. Her story doubles back on itself in the course of her tale; everything occurs more than once, indicating a kind of cyclical history, and yet, as Suzanne Conklin Akbari has noted in a recent talk at the University of Rochester, the story denies us either a complete cycle or a complete teleology. It is both cyclical and linear and it is neither. It moves in and out of historical time, and never allows Custance, or the reader, a clear footing in either realm. The heroine's movements around the earth in her rudderless ship unsettle boundaries and binaries of time and space even as they assert them. The ocean is both vital and distant, encompassing land masses but existing beyond and outside of those realms. It serves as a threshold to other lands, and yet is a distinct conduit, unlike a road, which is built into the land itself. As a conduit not created by humans, it is far more threatening and unpredictable. Because of its placement on mappae mundi, it also exists outside of history, functioning as an extrahistorical realm. Custance’s oceanic travels thus represent a new kind of storytelling that is – like the ocean – a threshold, a liminal space between kinds of narratives. The realms of land and sea, and the types of narratives embodied by each, are not as separate as they might appear on the map; likewise, modes of narrative production intersect in dynamic ways throughout the tale and allow for the passive Custance to reshape the religio-cultural contours of her world.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Hermeneutics of Consumption in Perceval of Galles
I am looking forward to hearing all about Kalamazoo from Kristi -- so terribly sad to have missed it this year, but the impending move to California made the annual pilgrimage impossible this time around. From the sound of it, the conference was as energizing as ever! I have a feeling that my co-blogger will be posting within the next few days, if not sooner, but in the meanwhile, I thought I'd make a long-overdue contribution . . .
With the looming cross-country move, I'm afraid I haven't had nearly as much time for blogging as I'd hoped for over the past few months. I have several posts (currently in nascent form and backlogged given the pre-move insanity) which will soon find their way over here. At the moment, however, my brain is firing in several different directions, which doesn’t make for lucid blogging! But since I've only been meaning to do this since March, I want to share a paper I presented at this year's NEMLA convention. Writing it was a somewhat hair-raising experience; deciding to present (and, I'll confess, write) a conference paper just a few days after my dissertation filing deadline might have been more than a bit absurd on my part. Miraculously, however, my paper somehow came together despite the time crunch, and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to present in this particular session. The panel, organized by my inimitable co-blogger, Kristi, and the equally lovely Hilarie Lloyd, was both diverse in content and convergent in interests and theme. I am always amazed by these kinds of sessions. The fact that you can manage to have a papers on a medieval romance, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and victory gardens all speak to each other is nothing short of innervating, and a true testament to how interconnected we can be despite our specializations.
With the looming cross-country move, I'm afraid I haven't had nearly as much time for blogging as I'd hoped for over the past few months. I have several posts (currently in nascent form and backlogged given the pre-move insanity) which will soon find their way over here. At the moment, however, my brain is firing in several different directions, which doesn’t make for lucid blogging! But since I've only been meaning to do this since March, I want to share a paper I presented at this year's NEMLA convention. Writing it was a somewhat hair-raising experience; deciding to present (and, I'll confess, write) a conference paper just a few days after my dissertation filing deadline might have been more than a bit absurd on my part. Miraculously, however, my paper somehow came together despite the time crunch, and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to present in this particular session. The panel, organized by my inimitable co-blogger, Kristi, and the equally lovely Hilarie Lloyd, was both diverse in content and convergent in interests and theme. I am always amazed by these kinds of sessions. The fact that you can manage to have a papers on a medieval romance, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and victory gardens all speak to each other is nothing short of innervating, and a true testament to how interconnected we can be despite our specializations.
And so, without further ado, the paper!
It’s Not Easy Eating
Green: Hermeneutics of Feminine Consumption
in Sir Perceval of Galles.
This map, by Lynton Lamb, appeared on the endpapers to
Charles Williams’ first edition of Taliessin
Through Logres (1938).
From Charles Williams,
edited by David Llewellyn Dodds (Rochester: Boydell, 1991).
This map is not medieval, but it
resonates with the medieval configuration of women and women’s bodies in the
text I’ll be discussing here. It
appeared as the endpapers to a 1938 poetry collection entitled Taliessin Through Logres by Charles
Williams, a member of the famed Inklings and one with a keen investment in
things Arthurian. Here you can find the map of Europe, superimposed by a
woman’s body. At the head, we have England,
the seat of Arthurian power, and further down, we have Jerusalem in a place
would be more shocking if it didn’t align so neatly with medieval
configurations of the Holy City as the navel of the world. This map – however unwittingly – encapsulates
the relationship between feminized corporeal and terrestrial bodies in Sir Perceval of Galles, one that directly
informs and is informed by the instances of ingestion that occur throughout the
narrative.
This paper comes
out of a larger discussion in my dissertation about the emblematic roles that
women play in late middle English romances, especially those concerned with
aspects of crusade and recovery (of territory and from various kinds of
trauma). The Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles relies on
imbricated levels of recovery for its narrative momentum, many of which hinge
on the comingling of female bodies and the landscapes they inhabit. Both bodies (corporeal and terrestrial) are
inextricably bound to one another in this romance. Their relationship is
established in its very first lines, and reinforced throughout Perceval’s
martial defense of a placed called “Maydenlande” – a region whose very name
alludes in a charmingly obvious way to the symbolic relationship between female
bodies and feminized landscapes. The
scene that seals this relationship, however, involves a strange act of
ingestion, involving one of the most pivotal women in the text — Perceval’s
mother — consuming nothing but grass and water; consuming, in essence, the very
thing that defines her worth and the worth of the other women in her
society. Her eating seeks a tacit
reversal of the established association of female bodies with territory, but in
the end her eating only reinscribes her in that very circuit of symbolic value.
The significance
of this passage only becomes clear through the establishment of symbolic female
bodies earlier in the romance, and so I’ll begin my discussion by providing you
with a brief summary. The Middle-English Sir
Perceval of Galles is, by all accounts, focused on male action. It centers
on the exploits of Perceval, a young man raised in the wilderness by a mother
afraid of the dangers of chivalric society (which press men into armed conflict
and which resulted in the death of her husband). Perceval grows curious about the broader
world, and eventually abandons his mother to enter society. He fails on numerous occasions to read the
world correctly, inexperienced as he is with its nuances. He learns slowly, but gradually, how to
acculturate himself, and develops from a “fool of the field” who mistakes a
pregnant mare for a destrier to one of Arthur’s elite knights and a king in his
own right. His mother, largely absent
from the story, looms in the recesses of Perceval’s developing identity,
however, and he eventually embarks on a quest to recover her.
Scholars have
often remarked that this version of Perceval’s story lacks the very thing that
defines its source text. Chretien’s Conte du Graal, is, after all, dominated by
Perceval’s Grail quest and all of its failures. Here, however — to draw on an observation of
Russell Peck’s — Perceval’s mother, and his sense of home, becomes his grail. His redemptive and penitential quest to
recover her becomes the final feat he must accomplish before he can end his
life fighting in the Holy Land as a crusader.
Women, then, play a significant role in the romance, even if their
“screen-time” remains remarkably brief.
Perceval of Galles begins with the
marriage of the eponymous hero’s parents, an event that establishes the
interconnectedness of feminized bodies in the romance. King Arthur gives his
sister Acheflour in marriage to a knight, confusingly named Perceval as
well. This passage makes clear, however,
that this marriage comes with more than just a bride:
Tharefore Kyng Arthoure
Dide hym mekill honoure:
He gaffe hym his syster Acheflour,
To have and to holde
Fro thethyn till his lyves ende,
With brode londes to spende,
For he the knyght wele kende. (21-27)
Dide hym mekill honoure:
He gaffe hym his syster Acheflour,
To have and to holde
Fro thethyn till his lyves ende,
With brode londes to spende,
For he the knyght wele kende. (21-27)
[Therefore King Arthur did (Sir Perceval) much honor: he gave him his
sister Acheflour, to have and to hold, from thence until his life's end, with broad
lands to use, for he knew the knight well.]
The wedding then, connects the
bride to the land by making a marriage with her synonymous with territorial
acquisition. Perceval Sr., in the lines
that follow, journeys to the church to — as the narrator tells us – marry the
woman and “win gifts that were good” — yet another reminder that this marriage
indelibly ties women to the tangible goods that they bring into a marriage.
This
dynamic is revisited in the middling portion of the romance, as the young
Perceval wages a war against a Sultan, who threatens to overtake a region
called Maydenlande. Throughout this episode, Lufamore — the
besieged ruler of Maydelande — is consistently bound (both literally and
figuratively) to her territory. The sultan,
for instance, seizes her lands, and — wishing to claim her body as well — forces
her to retreat into her castle while he lays a siege (977-1000). Lufamore herself enacts this binding of
territorial and corporeal bodies by stating that whoever rescues her will
"hafe this kyngdome and me, / To welde at his will” (1339-1340). Her desire to ensure that the right man gains control over her and her
lands trumps any desires for continued autonomy on her part; she finds herself
in control, after all, only because her brothers, her father, and her uncle have
already been killed by the sultan.
The invading Saracen army directly
threatens the Christian landscape in ways that are directly linked to rape. As
the messenger tells Perceval:
Up resyn es a Sowdane:
Alle hir landes hase he tane;
So byseges he that woman
That scho may hafe no pese."
He sayse that scho may have no pese,
The lady, for hir fayrenes,
And for hir mekill reches.
"He wirkes hir full woo;
He dose hir sorow all hir sythe,
And all he slaes doun rythe;
He wolde have hir to wyfe,
And scho will noghte soo.
Now hase that ilke Sowdane
Hir fadir and hir eme slane,
And hir brethir ilkane,
And is hir moste foo.
So nere he hase hir now soughte
That till a castelle es scho broghte,
And fro the walles will he noghte,
Ere that he may hir too. (977-96)
Alle hir landes hase he tane;
So byseges he that woman
That scho may hafe no pese."
He sayse that scho may have no pese,
The lady, for hir fayrenes,
And for hir mekill reches.
"He wirkes hir full woo;
He dose hir sorow all hir sythe,
And all he slaes doun rythe;
He wolde have hir to wyfe,
And scho will noghte soo.
Now hase that ilke Sowdane
Hir fadir and hir eme slane,
And hir brethir ilkane,
And is hir moste foo.
So nere he hase hir now soughte
That till a castelle es scho broghte,
And fro the walles will he noghte,
Ere that he may hir too. (977-96)
["Uprisen is a sultan, all her lands has
he taken; he so besieges that woman that she may have no peace." He says
that she may have no peace, the lady, because of her fairness, and because of
her great riches. "He works her
full woe; he does her sorrow all her days, and everyone he slays straight
away. He would have her to wife, and
would not so. Now has the Sultan her father and her uncle slain, and each of
her brothers, and (he) is her greatest enemy.
So closely he has pursued her now that she has been brought to a castle,
and he will not leave the walls until he might take her.]
The
verb “to take” appears frequently in this passage, and it is one that was
regularly used in medieval literature to refer both to the wrongful acquisition
of land and to rape. The consistent use
of this word in the passage renders coterminous the bodies threatened by the
sultan.
His actions require swift martial —
and marital — action, and Percival brashly charges to the rescue as soon as he
hears word of the sultan’s invasion.
That the contested territory is called Maydenlande firmly solders the
female and territorial bodies in the text, because it recalls all that a knight
such as Perceval can hope to win in the course of chivalric adventures: lands,
a wife, and a heritage. But it also signals the obligations a knight has to
protecting pure and untouched female bodies. As a result, the name inspires the
urgency of Perceval’s quest, actualizing his chivalric potential in the
process. Perceval almost single handedly
routes the Saracen army, beheads the sultan, and subsequently wins the hand of
Lufamour. They are married almost immediately afterwards. As the narrator tells
us:
Now has Perceval the brave
Wedded Lufamour the bright
And is king full right
Of all that broad land. (1745-48).
Like
the marriage of Perceval’s parents that beings the romance, this description
links the woman — in this case Lufamour — with the land itself. Their marriage,
in sum, is important in no small part because of the territory and
knightly/kingly accouterments Perceval acquires though her.
After his full instatement into
chivalric and Arthurian society, Perceval’s thoughts eventually wind his way to
his mother, who as we discover, has been living on a diet of grass and water in
the woods:
He thoghte
on no thyng,
Now on his moder that was,
How scho levyde with the gres,
With more drynke and lesse,
In welles, there thay spryng.
Drynkes of welles, ther thay spryng,
And gresse etys, withowt lesyng!
Scho liffede with none othir thyng
In the holtes hare. (1772-80)
Now on his moder that was,
How scho levyde with the gres,
With more drynke and lesse,
In welles, there thay spryng.
Drynkes of welles, ther thay spryng,
And gresse etys, withowt lesyng!
Scho liffede with none othir thyng
In the holtes hare. (1772-80)
[He thought on nothing, not at all on his
mother, how she lived upon the grass, with more drink and less from wells that sprang.
(She) drinks from wells, that spring there, eats grass without ceasing! So she
lived on no other thing, in the gray woods.]
He
grows concerned for his mother’s well-being and laments that he left her
“manless” in the forest. As he
discovers, her situation is dire indeed. She has gone mad with grief; the
sultan’s brother, the Giant Gollerothirame, attempted to woo her with
Perceval’s ring, causing her to assume that her son is dead. While her insanity is not directly associated
with her ingestion of the earth, retreating to the wilderness in medieval
literature is often configured as a descent into madness. Her flight to the forest with the young
Perceval at the outset of the romance because of her fears of chivalric
violence invite such associations, and her diet of earth and water alone is, I
argue, a uniquely feminine iteration of madness in the romance, and one that
seeks to reverse the significations at play earlier in the narrative.
Her consumption of the earth attempts
(inadvertently) to reverse the previously established association of female
bodies with territory. Whereas the land
serves as a signifier of the woman’s societal worth, here the mother seeks
autonomy over the land that has defined her existence by becoming its devourer. She tries, through this act of consumption,
to transform herself into a signifier rather than one signified, reversing —
in essence — the circuit of value into which she, and
the other women in the romance, have heretofore been inscribed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has appropriated Deleuze
and Guattari’s theories of posthuman bodies to explain the relationship between
knights and their horses. In essence, he
argues that the two co-create and perform a so-called inhuman circuit, a
“strange assemblage” in which identity and form are inextricably interlinked,
where “no possibility of concrete embodiment” can be found and where the “best analysis
can only map movements” ("The Inhuman Circuit," 172). I would like to offer here that Perceval’s
mother, in her eating of earth and water, creates a parallel inhuman
circuit. But whereas the relationship
between man and horse is an inherently active one, the relationship between
woman and land is deeply and inexorably passive. Its circuitry requires dominion. And so, while Acheflour, in a presumably
maddened state, hungers for a reversal of this cyclic system of worth, her
symbolic ingestion can only backfire. In
the end, it only literalizes her body’s indelible connection to the land and
the requirements of masculine rule and protection that are also bound to it.
As I already mentioned, Perceval embarks
on his journey to find his mother out of concerns that she lives “manless” in
the woods. Her unusual appetites and rejections
(of traditional demarcations of identity and worth, but also of civilization) ultimately
requires the entrance of a male who can restore proper order. In the world of Perceval of Galles both female and territorial bodies require
protection and governance, benefits that Perceval actively denied his mother
when he abandoned her in the forest.
Their eventual reunion, her subsequent recovery from madness, and their
return to society (to Perceval’s kingdom in Maydenlande) signals both the
mother's return to her rightful place and status, but also the reinscription of
the feminine into the culture and the lands that define her worth. It also enacts a form of domestic recovery
that parallels and facilitates Perceval’s crusading.
This feminized inhuman circuit,
then, primarily endorses the value of the male’s chivalric identity. Acheflour’s aberrant appetites for reversal
and for agency are cut short through her son’s rescue and, compellingly,
through another act of ingestion:
The geant had a drynk wroghte,
The portere sone it forthe broghte,
For no man was his thoghte
Bot for that lady.
Thay wolde not lett long thon,
Bot lavede in hir with a spone.
Then scho one slepe fell also sone,
Reght certeyne in hy.
Thus the lady there lyes
Thre nyghttis and thre dayes,
And the portere alwayes
Lay wakande hir by.
Thus the portare woke hir by -
Ther whills hir luffed sekerly, -
Till at the laste the lady
Wakede, als I wene.
Then scho was in hir awenn state
And als wele in hir gate
Als scho hadde nowthir arely ne late
Never therowte bene.
Thay sett tham down one thaire kne,
Thanked Godde, alle three,
That he wolde so appon tham see
As it was there sene.
Sythen aftir gan thay ta
A riche bathe for to ma,
And made the lady in to ga,
In graye and in grene. (2245-70)
The portere sone it forthe broghte,
For no man was his thoghte
Bot for that lady.
Thay wolde not lett long thon,
Bot lavede in hir with a spone.
Then scho one slepe fell also sone,
Reght certeyne in hy.
Thus the lady there lyes
Thre nyghttis and thre dayes,
And the portere alwayes
Lay wakande hir by.
Thus the portare woke hir by -
Ther whills hir luffed sekerly, -
Till at the laste the lady
Wakede, als I wene.
Then scho was in hir awenn state
And als wele in hir gate
Als scho hadde nowthir arely ne late
Never therowte bene.
Thay sett tham down one thaire kne,
Thanked Godde, alle three,
That he wolde so appon tham see
As it was there sene.
Sythen aftir gan thay ta
A riche bathe for to ma,
And made the lady in to ga,
In graye and in grene. (2245-70)
[The giant had made a drink, the porter soon brought it forth, for he
thought on no one except that lady. They did not wait long then, but poured the
liquid in her with a spoon, right certainly in haste. Thus the lady laid there,
three nights and three days, and the porter always lay watching by her. Thus
the porter watched beside her — because he loved her truly — until at last the
lady woke, as I understand. Then she was in her own state, and as well in her
normal way as she had been neither early nor late. They set them down on their knees and thanked
God, all three, that He would look upon them so, as it was there to see. Then
after they prepared a rich bath, and made the lady go into it, in gray and in grene.]
Perceval
brings his mother to a castle after finding her in the forest, and the porter
supplies a magical elixir, which he and Perceval promptly pour down her
throat. She sleeps for three nights and
three days, with the porter watching over her every moment. When she wakes she
is described as being “in her own state . . . as she had neither formerly nor
recently been before.” This drink,
created, supplied, and administered by males, permanently erases any attempts
of autonomy created by the mother’s previous acts of consumption, and it also
literalizes her inscription into the very system she had attempted to
break. That she is placed in Maydenlande
with her daughter-in-law Lufamore in the closing lines of the romance, then, completes
her reinstatement in the feminized inhuman circuit of the romance.
Acts of ingestion in this romance
are ones that seek either to affirm or deny the coterminous nature of feminized
corporeal and terrestrial bodies and their ties to those who would govern
them. Threatening forms of consumption
exist as well, in the form of the Sultan cast as a literal and figurative
rapist (of lands and of territory), and in his brother, the Giant
Gollerothirame, who causes Acheflour to go mad with grief by attempting to woo
her with her son’s ring (which he procured through a complicated series of
events). Women’s bodies are
synchronously aligned with the lands that they intrinsically promise to the men
in this romance world, and Achefloure’s attempts to short-circuit her ties to
that society in the end only inscribe her more deeply into that symbolic
system. Like Charles William’s drawing,
her body becomes a chivalric roadmap — it gives birth to a hero and must be
rescued by a hero, and any attempts to break it free will ultimately prove
fruitless.
The romance’s consistent return to the
coterminous nature of feminine and territorial bodies informs Perceval's
development as a knight and as a crusader.
It inspires and legitimizes his desires to protect women while
actualizing his social ascension from an outsider to a king and favored member
of Arthur's court. By feminizing its landscapes, this romance amplifies the
hero’s obligations to protect them in ways that prefigure and enhance the
prestige of his final crusade in the Holy Land.
In this way, Sir Perceval of
Galles literalizes the symbolic implications of female bodies and their
consumptive powers as starkly as William’s map, demonstrating women in this
romance are figures superimposed but also forever bound to, the lands that they
inhabit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)