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| Langjökull, which I hiked with my family in 2012 |
by J J Cohen
The most recent International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo was wonderful in many ways, but also at times reaffirmed my increasing dissatisfaction with traditional conference panels. Three or four loosely connected papers plus a response and then (if there is time, because inevitably someone has gone too long) aleatory questions from the audience that may advance the communal topic or may (if the session chair is not moderating) allow the three people who study liturgy to render the session on postcolonial medieval studies a liturgy session because one paper had a brief reference to liturgical calendars -- well, I don't always get as much as I would like from such gatherings. Blogs and other social media have made these loose sessions less useful than they were in the past, since it is now fairly easy to garner public feedback on ideas and projects without reading an excerpt in front of an audience for fifteen minutes. Such sessions can be productive, especially when the theme is specific, the papers carefully curated by the organizer, and the panel moderated so that the conversation is inclusive and focused. But that does not always happen. I find myself drawn more to sessions with multiple, short presentations and lingering discussion afterwards, to roundtables that approach a single issue from multiple perspectives, and to spaces adjacent to as well as within the conference that are not part of the official program.
I've written here at ITM about para-conference space as a fecund expanse for modes of thinking and doing that official conference sessions disinhibit: see the justification for the GWMEMSI Rogue Session at the last Kalamazoo, as well as my account of what actually unfolded there. For the upcoming BABEL conference in Santa Barbara, a large group of us (13!) crowdsourced and brainstormed a special session on SCALE that includes an outdoor "collaboratory" in the Channel Islands. The day before the conference begins, we will take a boat to Santa Cruz and hike the rocky canyon around Scorpion Bay, hoping something will emerge from this peripatetic and communal cognition that would not have been possible within a conference room. And at the upcoming New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress in Reykjavik, I've arranged two roundtables on "Ice" that will include a group hike of Sólheimajökull, a glacier in the south of the island. If time permits we will also head to Eyjafjallajökull,
the ice topped caldera of a nearby extinct volcano. Oddur Sigurðsson of the Icelandic Meteorological Office (and respondent to the Ice roundtables) will lead us, since he knows this glacier intimately through his studies. We've hired a well reputed expedition company to supply us with the necessary equipment and keep us safe. It seems to me that if we are going to gather in Iceland to speak about representations of ice, if we are going to theorize ice and think with it, we also ought to walk across a frozen expanse together.
If you are attending NCS, I hope you'll come to the roundtables on the first day of the conference. Abstracts for the presentations are below.
ICE
ROUNDTABLES
WEDNESDAY 16 JULY
GROUP 1: 9:00-10:30
1A Roundtable: Ice (1) Theory (HT 103)
Thread: North: Texts
Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen
Chair: Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen
1. Timothy S. Miller, University of Notre Dame,
“Like Ice / Ice Like: Fluidity, Solidity, and Reading Metaphor Backwards”
Ice
famously lies at the foundation of Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame -- figuratively but not literally, we might be
tempted to add, unless we recognize that the poem consistently confuses the
figurative and the literal in a way that might enable a
new reading of the frozen foundation of the goddess Fame's castle. After all,
in Chaucer as elsewhere in medieval and modern literature, ice most often
figures fluidity rather than solidity, change rather than stability. Inspired
by both recent posthumanist thought and the complex allegorical mechanisms of
the poem itself, this paper raises a simple set of questions: first, what can the
House of Fame and other medieval
narratives that employ ice in the discourse of metaphor and/or allegory tell us
about ice in its material ecologies? How do those ecologies differ from the
world of metaphor that the substance so frequently inhabits and undergirds? In order to begin answering these questions, this paper willfully adopts an
inverted reading strategy: what if we were to read Chaucer's House of Fame as
if it were a poem fundamentally "about ice," that is, as if the
vagaries of human fame that the poem dramatizes were an extended
metaphor for ice and its inherently fluid mutability rather than the other way
around? One of most brilliant things that has ever been said about the poem
must be Robert W. Hanning's suggestion that we read it backwards, but this
paper proposes reading the House of Fame
"backwards" in a different way: reading its foundational metaphor
backwards, as it were. Furthermore, it is the presence of ice itself -- a
subject of endless fascination and commentary in classical and medieval
scientific writings on phase change -- that permits this inversion. Although
fluid in more ways than one in its transformation from liquid into solid, ice
also seems to signal the end of mutability in becoming a
substance no longer fluid but fixed. Yet medieval authors who employ ice in
metaphor rely on the substance's concealment within itself of the potential for
reversal, for melting and reverting to water. In medieval narrative, then, ice
so often appears to be a feature of the natural world taken as a given and a
known -- "cold as yse" had become a well-worn phrase even in the 14th
century -- and then invoked as such to explore the complexities of human
relations through reference to something believed simpler and more
intelligible. But everywhere that we find ice, we should perhaps take this
radical but necessary step to understanding a key ecology of the inhuman: imagining the human world as a metaphor for
phase change, especially since the human body cannot itself ever endure such an
experience (medieval bodies, too, could only be "frosyn to dead"). But in reversing the ways that ice has been used to explain the human,
perhaps we can use the human to travel beyond the human and approach ice
itself.
2. Lowell Duckert, West Virginia University,
“Icespeak”
“I want to find out
what these stones and rocks and pieces of ice are trying to say to me.” (Terje
Insungset)
“We heard the world open, express
itself, clamor, rumble, call, demand, invade, fear, be moved, forbid. I’m
telling the story of the world beginning to tell its story.” (Michel Serres)
Recent ecocritical
studies of voice tend to privilege organic
sounds (like those of animals). To counteract this tendency, my presentation
will amplify the presence of one nonorganic voice around us – ice. The human is never the sole
speaking subject in these conversations – a position that the recent collection
Arctic
Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (2012)
unfortunately ignores. Following Tim Ingold’s (2011) call for a more
theoretically-rigorous and materially-inflected investigation of soundscapes
(or any –scape), and building on Michel Serres’s theories of noise as a
creative force that generates multiplicities outside of meaning, I will argue
that icescapes are soundlabs that synthesize (“place together”) humans
and nonhumans into noisy assemblages. These alliances, or what anthropologist
Steven Feld (2003) deems “acoustemologies,” disrupt our ways of knowing and
being in the world while, at the same time, create new forms of response, new
theories of speaking, and more expressive modes of ontology. To examine
the potential that icespeak holds, I will turn to two soundlabs in particular:
(1) modern scientists’ obsession with the “song” of icebergs, a frequency emitted by ice at 0.5 Hz and thus inaudible
to human ears without additional instruments; (2) the “experimental” compositions
of Terje Insungset, whose “icemusic” synthesizes the artist’s body with its material medium. Icespeak’s synthesizing agency never reaches
totality; icy noise can signal the unidentifiable or herald an oncoming
catastrophe, for example. Yet both soundlabs reconceive ways of synthesizing
our shared stories and bodies beyond the “death cries” of calving (a common
conception); they redefine listening as an active response to nonorganic speech; they emphasize the improvisation, endless variation, and enchantment
that living with/in a noisy, and melting, world entails; and they compel us,
finally, to attend to voices not our own, and to tell stories of beginnings
rather than of ends with them.
 |
| Paul Kos, “The Sound of Ice Melting” (1970) |
3. Ethan Knapp, Ohio State University, “Frost”
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
-- W. Stevens
This roundtable presentation would have two aims. First, I'd use the opportunity to offer my
own short take on Object Oriented Ontology, coming out of past work with
Heidegger and aiming to suggest a place or two where I see OOO coming into
particularly fruitful connection with various modes of historicist analysis and
critique. Second, I'd try to use this
framework to cast some fresh light on one of the most famous moments of Gower's
Confessio Amantis, the beau retret made by Amans at the
conclusion of Book 8, when Cupid pulls out the fiery dart that he had thrust
into him at the outset of Book 1, leaving Gower suddenly an old man, outside
the parade of lovers, baffled by the passions that had driven him as
Amans.
This new state is described through a seasonal
metaphor. Gower looks in a mirror, sees
his new state, and glosses it through an extended description of the passage of
months in a year, as Spring yields to Winter.
This metaphor is usually exhausted as a traditional topos linking the
passage of human years to the passage of seasons, a meaning certainly important
in the context of the Confessio's
regular invocation of humanity as microcosmic fulcrum of the broader
world. But I'd like to put some
additional pressure on this moment. Of
all the elements that mark the condition of winter in this topos (cold, grief,
darkness, barrenness, hunger) it is clearly, and emphatically, cold that most engages Gower here. The dart whose removal precipitates this
scene is described always as "fiery" or "hot"; Venus tends
the wound left behind with an ointment "mor cold than eny keie"; and
the description of Winter itself begins with "frost, snow, wind and
rain" and ends simply with "chill." Moreover, within this wintry constellation, frost seems the crucial term. Winter is evoked here to gloss the changes
Gower sees in his own face, and these changes all connect to frost – a new pale
color, veiny wrinkles and his face 'defaced' as though it were covered from
view by a new element.
So, why frost? My
thoughts are still preliminary at this stage, but I'd like to explore the way
in which frost appears here as the mode through which the elemental form of ice
comes most directly into contact with the human, in a process of near fusion
that leaves both changed. Frost
covers. It spreads and becomes something
like a second skin, rendering the human into another icy object. The strangeness of this transformation helps
explain, I think, the delicately ambiguous tone of the conclusion to the Confessio. Amans becomes Gower as he is covered by
frost, as he enters into a frosty stage of existence. This is quiescence, of a sort, but it is also
Gower presenting himself as author of the scene. Hence my epigraph – the Gower of this passage
is not so much moral satirist as he is an object coming to know itself as
object.
I can add here that I also plan to contextualize this
reading by contrasting Gower's metaphoric choice of fire and frost to the more
conventional Petrarchan choice of the antonyms fire and ice. The two pairs are usually taken to be pretty
identical oppositions, but I'll aim to tease out the sense of this small, but I
think important, alteration in the convention.
4. Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, “Hugh
Willougby Talks to the Seafarer about Ice”
This talk will tell the
story of an imagined conversation about ice between a literary and a historical
figure. The literary figure, the narrator of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem
“The Seafarer,” treats frozen northern waters as a symbol of physical, cultural,
and spiritual alienation. The historical figure, Sir Hugh Willoughby, who froze
to death on board his ship Bona Esperanza
in the winter of 1553-54 while attempting to discover a Northeast Passage,
provides less direct testimony, but the surviving documents of his fatal voyage
imply that he treated ice as a physical obstacle. My talk juxtaposes these two
points of view – the poetic narrator’s alienation and the historical figure’s
encumbrance – to argue that ice represents an environmental limit that human
culture translates into a cultural symbol. The frozen, “ice-cold waves”
(“iscaldne waeg” 19a) the Seafarer endures transform themselves over the course
of the poem into a promise of a reward from God in heaven (“Faeder on heofunum”
115a). Willoughby, by contrast, confronts an ice-scape that cannot be
transmuted into symbol. I will explore these two points of view in relation to
three central experiences of premodern cultures in the frozen north Atlantic –
discovery, mystery, and catastrophe – to argue that ice provides an especially
clear vision of two related elements in human conceptualizations of their
environment: first, that it is difficult and dangerous to transform
environmental dangers into symbolic tokens, and second, that doing so is,
usually, irresistible. For a modern extension of the dangers, pleasures, and
challenges of making alien seascapes into poetry, I’ll conclude with a brief
description of Caroline Bergvall’s brilliant new poem Drift, which combines an experimental translation of “The Seafarer”
with the historical records about the “Left-to-Die boat” containing Lybian
refugees that drifted through the Mediterranean in 2011 under the watchful eyes
of NATO planes and ships. Bergvall’s poem combines historical catastrophe with
medieval poetic beauty, and she, like me, asks how poetry responds to alien
environments.
2B Roundtable: Ice (2) Writing (HT 104)
Thread: North: Texts
Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Chair: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
1. Dan Remein, New York University, “Icerune”
How does ice make its
mark in what is ostensibly human literary language? This paper will consider
this question especially as it concerns the Old Icelandic Greenlander Sagas and
their place within a longer literary history of ice in the medieval North Atlantic.
Ice, or 'is,' has its own runic character in the “futhork.” The opening pages
of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda
refer to a swelling floe of toxic ice in the yawning-void whose melted drops
form the first of the mythic frost-giants. Earlier in the medieval period, the
Old English Riddles invoked the delicate icing-over of a puddle, a wave
transforming from slushy churn into ice, and the noise of an iceberg
accelerating into breakup and contact with shore. The Norse Greenland
settlements would have been beset by ice: whether at home, on the marginal
areas of habitation, or at sea. Fluctuations in coastal ice conditions in the
thirteenth century seem to have required altering older routes from Iceland to
Greenland. Norse Greenlanders headed to the icy far north of the Davis Strait
to hunt walrus, and some may have relied on the u-shaped curve of this ice
shelf to direct them across the strait when headed to North America for timber
and iron. So why then do the Greenlander Sagas seem relatively uninterested in
ice? In this paper, I consider why the fragile and frightening dynamics of ice
seem so absent from the thirteenth century literary accounts of the Norse
Greenland settlements and explore how ice may have nonetheless less left behind
its own markings, however secret or faint. By what non-representational floes,
crystallizations, freezes, or thaws can human language register the speed,
temperature, age, fragility, durability, sharpness, slipperiness, silence, and
noisiness of ice when not directly describing it?
2. Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur
University, “Vanishing Ice and The House of Fame: An Ecocritical Interrogation”
This
talk considers the agency of ice in Chaucer’s The House of Fame. In the allegorical dream vision, the House of
Fame sits upon a foundation of ice. The narrator, Geoffrey, climbs up a
mountain to the base of the castle and describes the glacial foundation at some
length. The names of famous persons are etched into its sides, and the narrator
notices that at least one side has melted so much that the names are lost
forever. The impermanence of these names seems to agitate the narrator, but he
instantly reassures himself by observing that the House of Fame’s shadow
protects the names on the opposite side of the foundation. Ice by its very
nature, however, is liminal, and its liminality likely contributed to Chaucer’s
decision to perch his House of Fame upon it. The palace sits, after all, “in
myddes of the weye / betwixen” heaven, earth, and the sea — an allusion,
perhaps, to the vaporous, solid, and liquid forms that water can take. The
melting of the building’s glacial foundation, in all of its inexorability,
consistently threatens its existence and the stories preserved in its walls.
Like the Mississippi River described by Jeffrey Cohen in Prismatic Ecologies, ice is an “earth artist,” “its projects
tak[ing] so long to execute that humans have a difficult time discerning their
genius” (xix). I argue in this talk that the narrator Geoffrey struggles with
this very limitation in human perception. He tries to comfort himself by seeing
at least a portion of the foundation as permanent, but in doing so he fails to
see – or perhaps chooses not to see – how much of human invention lies at the
mercy of the natural world and its movements.
As
such, even though this poem mentions it but briefly, ice remains the primary
agential object in The House of Fame.
And I argue that reading ice it in this way allows us to examine more
accurately the implications of the poem’s persistent enjambment of the human
and the non-human. The powerful presence of ice in The House of Fame reminds us that, while the poem concerns itself
in vibrant ways with human stories and objects, there exists in tandem to the
manmade a force that (however glacial its movements or its meltings) may
ultimately get the last word. In order to highlight ice’s agential role in the
poem, I will make regular use of images and videos of Icelandic glaciers. These
glaciers, and the landscapes carved in their wake, stand as quiet, looming
memorials to the power and the impermanence of ice, and my hope is that these
images will encourage a reading of this poem that acknowledges the significance
of ice in The House of Fame’s
interpretive landscape.
3. David Coley, Simon Fraser University, “Ice as
Parchment, Ice as Pen”
In
his fourteenth-century translation of De
proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa defines cristalle [quartz] as “snowe or ise [that] is ymade harde in space
of many ȝeres ... and torned into stoon nouȝt oonlich by vertu and strengþe of colde but more by erþelich
vertue.” He further notes, “þis stoon is cleere, and so lettres and oþere
þinges þat been ydo þerinne be yseie clereliche ynough.” For Chaucerians, Trevisa’s letters in petrified ice immediately recall The House of Fame’s “roche of yse”
inscribed with “famous folkes names,” a “febel fundament” for Fame’s temple and
an apt but unstable medium for written language.In the medieval imagination then, ice seems to have operated (at least in part)
as a volatile but effective parchment, a site on which the lucidity of the
written word strained against the essential impermanence of the text. It was a
midpoint between the stone of Belshazzar’s temple and the water of a still
pool, between the wall where Daniel once read Babylon’s doom and the ephemeral
surface where John Keats would, centuries later, record his own sad end: “Here
lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Recently
we have come to recognize ice not only as parchment but also, and
fundamentally, as stylus, gouging glacial inscriptions into the land like the
finger on Belshazzar’s temple wall. In our age of rising carbon levels and
glacial retreat, our ability to read such tectonic calligraphy seems ever more
urgent. How do we understand the inelegant scrawl of glacial moraine, the
sudden puncta of glacial calving, the
“rubbe and scrape” of advance and retreat? The glacial recession that Chaucer could never have foreseen in his “ofthowed”
ice carves fresh writing into the earth at an ever increasing rate, leaving
behind a dazzling calligraphy of stone and water. Are we, like Geffrey atop his ice boulder in The House of Fame, engaged in a new and sometimes bewildering
dialogue with a visibly disappearing icescape? Are we belated paleographers of
an icy, “roynish” hand? Or, more darkly still, are we more akin to the stunned
Babylonians staring at the letters in the temple wall—Mane, Thecel, Phares—struggling
to interpret these terrible glacial signs and the unwelcome truths that they
may portend?
4. Jeremy DeAngelo, University of Connecticut,
“Ice as Social Signifier”
Individuals in the Icelandic sagas often have names that
overtly reference ice—Jǫkul, for example, or Frosti. However, these names are
not distributed randomly among the characters; they invariably occur among
figures such as giants, trolls and Sámi—groups which in the sagas are marked by
their antisocial tendencies and existence on the margins of society. An
association with ice, therefore, indicates a certain type in a medieval
Icelandic context, one whose relationship with the colder elements guided the
understanding of their character, for good or for ill. For mythological or
legendary figures, their names’ invocation of the elements reinforced their
chthonic nature. In the pseudohistorical sagas, however, a link to ice reflects
the broad reality of the Scandinavian Peninsula, wherein the Sámi generally
inhabited the colder, more northerly and internal regions relative to Norse
settlement. The sagas often attribute the ability to survive in more extreme
conditions to either magic, a bestial nature, or both, and Sámi characters’
chilly demeanors in the literature suggest these qualities. Yet it happens in
the literature that these icy figures intermarry with the Norse, and their
children inherit both their names and their qualities. These talents serve them
well, yet also mark them as separate—hybrid figures whose antisocial tendencies
and affinity with ice keep them from fully functioning in proper society. As
characters in the literature of a people who themselves draw their identity
from ice (Ís-lendingar), these
figures indicate how the Icelanders saw themselves relative to the larger Norse
world: set apart on account of their frigid environment, tenacious and
irascible, yet stronger on account of their hardiness and hard-headedness. Ice,
therefore, in medieval Icelandic literature serves as a useful social marker,
one which indicates both one’s lineage and the behavior one should expect based
upon it.
5. James L. Smith, University of Western
Australia, “Touch of Frost”
Burning fire and chilling
frost Both bite the body’s senses with a different kind of ‘fang’, As shown by
how each makes us feel a different kind of pang.
~Titus Lucretius Carus, The Nature of Things (London: Penguin, 2007), 430, p. 48
In the thirteenth-century Grænlendinga saga, Leif Eriksson and the members of
his expedition were warming to the newly discovered green land, for “there was
no frost in winter, and the grass hardly withered.” Here, they imagined, was a
home free from the deprivations of life’s inevitable extremes in the chill
embrace of the Arctic Circle. In so doing, they generated an imagining redolent
of affect and agriculture in equal measure. The medieval Norse explorers dreamt
of a place in which, like all life in the cold, the onset of the ice could be
survived, could be weathered. And
yet, as many a polar explorer of the nineteenth century discovered to their
cost, there is no escape from the cool embrace of the ice when human
heat-making fails; the cold is an endless reminder of agential limitation. This
paper seeks to explore the touch of frost as a subtle play of power and
interdependency, non-human entanglement, and the limits of survival. Survival
at the onset of winter makes little distinction between inner and outer space,
for the confrontational piercing of human life with slow, gentle, violence
occurs literally and figuratively.
The modelling of inner space, the interplay
of coldness and warmth within the human heart, is a form of chill abstraction.
In the Old Testament, Job is able to weather misfortune when “The waters are
hardened like a stone, and the surface of the deep is congealed” because his
heart does not succumb (Job 38:30). The tree of his spirit is able to survive
through hardship until the ice melts and the fountains of fortune flow once more.
Medieval frost is dew, the romantic essence of heavenly providence spread with
favour across the earth, and yet it is hardened, its fluvial softness
transformed to adamant and piercing new shapes. As the Trevisa translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum puts is, “Hore
frost is no3t ellis but dewe Ifroren.” It, like life and fortune, has cycles. Regno becomes regnaui, which in turn becomes sum
sine regno: a human life becomes chill when broken beneath the wheel of
fortune. The heart, like flora in an icy climate, must seek to survive the
chill of psychological winter. The parable of the human heart, in an act of
synthesis with non-human interactivity, is shaped by the touch of frost.
RESPONDENT: Oddur Sigurðsson, Icelandic
Meteorological Office
