tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post2835048532712605936..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Insistent Return of a Corporealized Historiography and Future Making: Elizabeth Freeman’s ErotohistoriographyCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6592128877782676532009-01-17T16:38:00.000-05:002009-01-17T16:38:00.000-05:00I'm totally digging this post and the subsequent c...I'm totally digging this post and the subsequent comments, and am<BR/>inspired to immediately run out and read more of Freeman's work. <BR/><BR/>Eileen, I'm rolling the idea of "temporal binding" around in my mind and am thinking about all the images of being bound in OE poetry and how they might be interpreted in relation to time (they do often refer to the limits/isolation of being stuck in the present). But I'm also wondering about the "queerness" of saints "who allow themselves to be pulled backward by the undertow of the mainly mythologized history of Christ's<BR/>[and other martyrs'] suffering." For who is this queer? Or what is it queer in relation to? Love to hear your thoughts on queerness and<BR/>inter-temporality, but maybe I should just go and read some more<BR/>Freeman.<BR/><BR/>Lara FarinaAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50624095112879940282009-01-16T13:33:00.000-05:002009-01-16T13:33:00.000-05:00A couple of other things--Jeffrey: you also asked ...A couple of other things--<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey: you also asked in your comment,<BR/><BR/>". . . what's at stake in finding the "eroto" in a history that keeps turning away from desire ... and/or that keeps desiring things that might be repugnant"?<BR/><BR/>As "repugnant," you referenced, via Guthlac's story, the turn *away* from congeniality and the constant derision of the Britons/Celts--would you also reference the desire for various self-denials and self-negations, or are those in a different class? Of course, in a sense, Guthlac's refusal of the congeniality of both his family and friends as well as the fellow monks at Repton is connected [isn't it?] to his self-denials [drinking ditch water, living in an abandoned, sunken cistern, etc.?]. At the same time, it's hard to believe that he is really against congeniality when we realize that, at some point, his sister and a fellow monk Beccel are living alongside him [although Felix says merely that he was accompanied to Crowland "by two boys" and Beccel showed up later wishing to be Guthlac's "servant"], and in Felix's account there is a continual stream of visitors as well.<BR/><BR/>But more critically, in relation to the issue of desire, in both the Felix and Old English poetic accounts there is the repeated use of language indicating the "burning" of Guthlac's heart with regard to his desire for solitude, for being tormented, and for his own death. But interestingly, at the same time, in Felix's account, one of the temptations visited upon Guthlac is two demons who try to entice him with stories of the earlier desert hermits who mortified their own flesh and fasted extensively and they try to encourage Guthlac to fast for long periods of time [perhaps to cause him to quit his vocation and give in to despair?]--my assumption is that, at the time, there was some clerical controversy over the matter of fasting *too* much, and oddly, in his notes to his edition, Colgrave mentions that over-fasting was "a temptation to which the Celts, following in the footsteps of the Egyptian Fathers, were particularly prone." This would seem to fit with the overall anti-Celtic tenor of the narrative, but in relation to desire--again, I do not think it is difficult to find the "eroto" in a history that is not at all turning away from desire, but rather, is continually invoking the language of desire [especially through the trope of the "burning heart" and "eagerness" and "cupiditas"]. The interesting thing, then, is in tracing what is explicitly desired alongside the seam of desires supposedly foreclosed or even unthinkable [e.g. Guthlac's affections for his sister, so much so that he has to banish her from his *presence* specifically *in order* that he might see her in the afterlife, or the possibility that two demons would desire to be able to *touch* Guthlac and would weep at not being able to] that nevertheless are palpably expressed or *felt* in the text. This also leads to questions of authors and readers yet again, and also to questions, maybe, about these texts' conscious and more unconscious dimensions--*who* [character, author, reader, etc.] is feeling *what* and in which moments [past and present].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-66220430971489348152009-01-15T16:07:00.000-05:002009-01-15T16:07:00.000-05:00Thanks, everyone, for the comments so far [in a co...Thanks, everyone, for the comments so far [in a couple of days I'll have the notes on Freeman's "Turn the Beat Around," where I find myself much more "worked up"/agitated yet also inspired by her thinking].<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey and Karl: I've never thought of Guthlac-the-Saint as "real" in any sense of the word [in some respects, as Jeffrey suggests, he is just another medieval "copy" of Anthony in the desert] and his story is mainly a generic one, although at the same time, as a so-called "native" narrative, it does retain certain features that are unique enough to suggest that: 1. yes, there was likely a person named Guthlac who left his warrior life to pursue a spiritual path, first in a monastery, and then later out in the Anglian fens [and this rather ho-hum story, for whatever reason--likely political--later gets turned into hagiography], but 2) who, no, was not tortured by demons nor really knew the exact moment he would die. Indeed, the very homeliness of his "miracles" suggest that they may have been true stories later taken up and exaggerated for certain effects. And although the idea that, at a certain time in antiquity, there was a widespread and wholesale slaughter of Christians, is largely and likely untrue, there were some emperors & other empire officials who engaged in some horrific pogroms against Christians [I don't have my Lapidge article on me, although he references some of these events], but they were local and not common events [not part and parcel of anything like a "Final Solution," although they have often been portrayed as such within Christianity]. But whatever persecutions there were, they obviously inspired a cult of devotion among some for, as Karl puts it, the desire-to-be-desired-to-be-persecuted. <BR/><BR/>I don't think, though, Karl, that there was necessarily an *abandonment* of violence in early English hagiography, so much as there is a kind of division of labor between the narratives taken as a whole [whether via AElfric's "Lives of Saints" or the Cotton-Corpus Legendary or individual texts such as Felix's "Life of Guthlac"], in which we see a collation, or compendium/miscellany of fairly violent martyr narratives culled from antiquity, equally violent "native" martyr narratives, such as the "Life of Edmund" [whose persecution is at the hands of invading Vikings], and less violent confessor-saint stories, such as those of Guthlac and Cuthbert. In some respects, the demons who show up in the narratives of saints who come *after* a so-called pagan antiquity, are really stand-ins for earlier human torturers and executioners [with the caveat that you can never really execute a saint, you can only *try* to execute them].<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey: your question about the situatedness of interpreters [which, for me, would include a Felix as well as myself and all the readers and tellers/hearers of Guthlac's "Lives" in between] is partly what I was trying to get at--though perhaps, too obliquely--with my comments, following Freeman, on the importance of the question "why write?" and with the Nealon epigraph re: situating historical work "along the seam of its becoming-historical." So then, for me, erotohistoriography would name a practice of tracing the erotics, or "ars erotica" of Guthlac's narratives through various modes of the narratives' re-membering, dis-membering, and forgetting [which are all, to a certain extent, writerly modes--forget the so-called "real" story--and therefore, erotohistoriography could only really situate itself in and alongside the seams of texts, paying attention to where these texts bind themselves, and where the don't bind themselves--where they are headed, how, also, they are *stuck*]. As we've discussed before, I'm interested especially, in relation to the Guthlac story, in the figure of the sister [Pega] who doesn't really appear at all in the Felix or Old English poetic narratives [except via Guthlac asking his servant to convey his body to her after his death], yet she shows up later in other narratives and also in illustrations of the story in later manuscripts as someone who was *there with* Guthlac, up to a point. We know from a later narrative that a demon took on her appearance at one point to tempt Guthlac to fast *too much* and that Guthlac then banished her from his fenland island, and we know that one of his chief desires, stated at his death, is to be with her in heaven where he can see the light of her eyes. So, looking over a whole set of narratives, placed in different times and provenances, we see pieces of a story missing, then re-appearing. But even within one narrative we catch odd moments that only an author can be responsible for: for example, in Felix, and this really is something so weird, after his flight with demons down to Hell and back, and after God has basically commanded the demons to never touch Guthlac again, Guthlac wakes up and notices two demons in his barrow who are looking at him and weeping because they cannot touch him--but this is not the weird part. When the demons are first introduced, just before their flight with Guthlac, when they are also trying to rip him to pieces, Felix *only* describes them as part and pieces of bodies--human and animal--and also as more amorphous entities: clouds, swarms, and the like. But when Felix turns from his praying to consider/look at the two demons, Felix notes that Guthlac recognized them, and in this way:<BR/><BR/>". . . he turned his eyes for a moment and saw at his left hand two of the attendant spirits, whom he had noticed more than any of the others, standing and weeping."<BR/><BR/>I'll spare the Latin for now as Colgrave's translation is close enough, although there *is* some interesting philological slippage, BUT: what does it means that out of that earlier storm of demons in which all were parts of bodies [or rather, assemblages of monstrous body parts, like Frankensteins], that Guthlac *especially* recalled these two more than all the others? It's a queer moment and somehow *exceeds* the present moment/momentum of the narrative, and of the ideology of hagiography in general, and it's a *writerly* moment, isn't it? One that requires intervention, an interpretation that would locate the "eroto" in this moment that may not itself recognize the eroto *as such*. Does that make any sense? God knows. I think I'm running out of vodka. [Just kidding; I don't read/interpret medieval hagiography and drink at the same time, and no one should, not ever.]<BR/><BR/>So, then there's this question, too, of the *scholarly* affect, which I think Freeman is kind of arguing for with her erotohistoriography [for this isn't just about tracing what *was* felt in history/texts, but what can still be felt there and *now* in the historiographical enterprise], and this is also why her suggestion in the comments here of a geneaology of erotohistoriography is also interesting: it would mean, following Jeffrey, delineating the writing of history, over time, as a --I don't know--an art of sensibility? Obviously, rationalist history [post-18th century, certainly] would eschew such an approach. Is it worth considering the risks of what it might mean to re-route the historiographical enterprise as a mode of longing?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27462242701290016972009-01-15T10:55:00.000-05:002009-01-15T10:55:00.000-05:00Hi everyone. Sorry about the link below. I didn'...Hi everyone. Sorry about the link below. I didn't do it. Blogger's doing weird things again...Matthew Gabrielehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11971159578332078338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-5162786310530258832009-01-14T22:31:00.000-05:002009-01-14T22:31:00.000-05:00Oh, hmmm, I'm honored and somewhat startled to fin...Oh, hmmm, I'm honored and somewhat startled to find my work taken up in such interesting ways. I think I'd like to eavesdrop, if that's OK, because I have *much* to learn from medievalists. But a couple of thoughts:<BR/><BR/>I love the idea of erotohistoriography as always also philology. I can share one teeny weeny thing I've learned from a fantastic 18th-centuryist at Syracuse, Mike Goode. He explores Romantic historiography as an "ars erotica" of history-writing that gets squelched in the Victorian era, or at least relegated to women and writers of Gothic fiction. Following his logic, the interpretive tradition of casuistry, bound up as it is in sensibility, becomes if not the origin at least a vibrant contributor to a more avowedly queer and contemporary erotohistoriography. I'm wildly curious about embodied or sensory interpretive traditions in other historical periods. A genealogy of erotohistoriography? Is that too, uh, traditional?<BR/><BR/>As to the citations-visible-as-ruin, I'm definitely drawing from Walter Benjamin and work on allegory with that, Myra. I don't know enough about relics and reliquaries, but wonder if that would be a place to explore. [Insert here: plug for my friend and colleague Seeta Chaganti's new book on the subject of reliquaries]. <BR/><BR/>Any way, I'm grateful for Eileen's and all of your thoughts about my work, and look forward to getting medieval at Kalamazoo!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-52215691221002285352009-01-14T16:36:00.000-05:002009-01-14T16:36:00.000-05:00and who lives in a time and place (8th-century Eng...<I>and who lives in a time and place (8th-century England) when Christianity is established well enough that the brutal persecution of Christians has receded to a mythic past, </I><BR/><BR/>I need to look at the Lapidge you suggest. But, going with what I suspect now, given stories like Ursula and the 10,000 virgins, we should assume that the numbers and violence of the persecutions of Xians are grossly exaggerated, and thus we should think, instead, about the role the desire-to-be-desired-to-be-persecuted plays in establishing the importance of this movement (my thought here is a version of my explanation for the imagined deliciousness of human flesh: insofar as human flesh was thought to be desirable, human life was known to be valuable; insofar as Xians were thought to be persecuted, they were worth persecuting). Then we can start to wonder about the <I>abandonment</I> of violence in certain hagiography. <BR/><BR/>Certainly there are hagiographies produced simultaneous w/ Guthlac in which saints suffer terribly; but what happens when the primary violence the saint experiences is self-inflicted, and when the saint's miracles involve no cataclysms of bursting machinery (as w/ Katherine), but only homely miracles of horse-feeding (as w/ Cuthbert) or beer-finding? What dream of the self does this suggest? It's not as though the Guthlac hagiographer couldn't have given him to apostates or pagans. In a time of Vikings and of a strongly Muslim Iberia, surely a martyrdom could have been arranged. But that's not where the storyteller went. Why?<BR/><BR/><I>aren’t the tomato and monster-as-fertilizer still caught up, to a certain extent, in a cyclical reproductive (if vegetal) time? </I><BR/>Perhaps, but I would suggest that we can also understand this as a return of the same but with a difference; that there is no true cycle and simple return, at least in these contexts, simply because something new will have come before. The year may come around again, the earth may spin again, but there's always something new that makes what happens next different.<BR/><BR/>One last comment--and I have to admit that I've read only 2/3 of your post so far, although I have read both those Freeman articles--I love what you're doing here. But I also wonder about Knights, perhaps because I'm just about finished forcing my way through Wolfram von Eschenbach's <I>Parzival,</I> where knights, connected by highly erotically charged genealogies in which sex, place, admiration, memory, and politics are inextricable, strike me as paradigmatic figures through which to imagine, and witness, a polychronic, chronically outside-its-time, sexually displaced self.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22813912156975060862009-01-14T15:21:00.000-05:002009-01-14T15:21:00.000-05:00So much to ponder here. I'm grateful that you've s...So much to ponder here. I'm grateful that you've shared your notes and running commentary!<BR/><BR/>This line, early on, catches me:<BR/><EM>Erotohistoriography would name a practice of tracing histories written on queer bodies—more precisely, it would trace “how queer relations complexly exceed the present,” and “against pain and loss,” it would “posit the value of surprise, of pleasurable interruptions and momentary fulfillments from elsewhere, other times” [p. 59].</EM><BR/><BR/>So I wondered about situatedness of interpreters and the interpretive traditions that are inherited: what work do the texts do for Freeman as she stages her tracings and surprises? For you, Eileen? For the multiple authors of the Guthlac materials? From whom did they inherit their scripts for making erotohistoriography, and what is eligible for remembering, what for being forgotten? <BR/><BR/>I guess, that is, I wonder what's at stake in finding the "eroto" in a history that keeps turning away from desire ... and/or that keeps desiring things that might are repugnant (in the Guthlac legends, the flight from congeniality, the wearisome degrading of the Britons). Did Guthlac as such really even exist, or was he an ex-Mercian warrior slotted into a script actually written by Athanasius, when he narrated Antony's desert solitude? Or more intriguing ... is there a way in which Guthlac shows similarities to a Briton (Welsh/Celtic) style saint -- in which case his self-imposed exile makes him a martyr. <BR/><BR/>Maybe another way of putting this is to say that a medievalist can't do erotohistoriography without recognizing that its a form of philology.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34642717153019554192009-01-14T09:01:00.000-05:002009-01-14T09:01:00.000-05:00Thanks, Eileen, for sharing Freeman and yourself w...Thanks, Eileen, for sharing Freeman and yourself with us this way (and for pointing to a communion with Howie and Jeffrey that helps expand and ground Freeman in terms of ongoing ITM concerns), and for offering us this particular invitation to this BABEL panel at Kalamazoo. I'm particularly, though certainly not only, fascinated by Freeman's suggestion through _Shulie_ that "there are iterations, repetitions, and citations which are not strictly parodic, in that they do not necessarily aim to reveal the original as always already a copy, but instead engage with prior time as genuinely elsewhere. Nor are they strictly consolidating of authority, in that they leave the very authority they cite visible as a ruin. Instead they tap into a mode of longing . . . .” This offers much to medievalists in particular, and I'm eager to hear more--directly from Freeman, and from you in the promised upcoming post.Myra Seamanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02785617479392033454noreply@blogger.com