Distemporality: Richard III and That Whole Leicester Car Park Thing

by JONATHAN HSY

Caption: "Markers are laid out for excavation in Leicester, as two reenactment knights look on." [Press Association image; found HERE collated by HuffPo]

Disinternment and Discovery

Hello ITM readers. It has been a while since I've posted here! So, yeah, this is basically a chance for me as a medievalist to chime in and say something about this whole Richard III thing before the "moment" passes. Unless you've been hiding in a cave / under a rock / whatever these days, you've probably heard of the unearthing of what appears to be the DNA-confirmed body of the medieval English monarch Richard III (see HERE); this king is most commonly imagined (via Shakespeare and other sources) as an immoral, scheming villain with a hunchback. The curved spine of the body -- discovered buried underneath a car park (parking lot) -- seems to confirm the identification.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how notions of temporality (especially as developed in premodern literary studies) can further engage with conversations in disability studies, and I'd actually like to take "this Richard III moment" to think not so much about the king himself but a little something I'd like to call "distemporality." In this image above (with many similar ones online and in other media), we see a partially staged photo op: historical reenactors in "medieval" armor look on as the car park excavation begins. As far as I know this term hasn't really entered the critical lexicon in any coherent way (this term pops up in scholarship only idiosyncratically, in a rather ad hoc fashion), but I would say that a certain "distemporality" characterizes these types of cultural moments quite well. In a different context, Rebecca Schneider (discussing historian reenactments of Vietnam War art) identifies certain forms of reenactment as "[m]oments of dis-temporality, of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense occur in pauses ... or tiny details of interruptive anachronisms as the 'now' folds and multiplies -- even for [Howard] Zinn's 'brief flash'" (186). [1] This quotidian "snapshot" above -- a flashpoint humorously depicting a "culture clash" between everyday modern life and re-created nostalgia-inflused past -- visually conveys the distemporality effected by the entire "event" of Richard III's disinterment.

Distemporality, as I am thinking through the idea, is not just about temporal disruption per se: I'd like to use this concept to rethink everyday assumptions about how we move through time itself. If we more deeply unpack a notion of distemporality, we could say this involves attending more carefully to the co-operation of many different modes of transit and forms of motion through time and/as space. If queer temporality so often suggests a fluid motion across time -- flowing circuits of desire, contact, cross-identification etc. -- what happens if we attend to the profoundly uneven mechanics of motion itself, and reflect more closely upon the participation of co-agents to enable co-mobilities across time and space?

If this is all sounding too obscure, let me try to unpack this a bit more: The Richard III discovery -- often sensationalized as a disruptive, "game changing" encounter with the past (A "mind-blowing" discovery! See the video HERE) -- is, in my own mind, enacting a deep distemporality. The translated (transported) decomposing remains of a medieval body found underneath a modern car park -- a collective space for vehicles in transit -- at one grounds an event in stationary space while also evincing the potential of future motion and a manifold history of prior travels: multiple modes of motion in and through one shared space.

In other words, the "discovering" (dis-covering) of Richard III's body is simultaneously material and metaphorical (rather than a completely conceptual recovery or uncovering). In another admittedly quite disparate context, Jasbir Puar -- engaging with the temporal "flash points" of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida's time out of joint -- also cites Nilüfer Göle in reference to September 11 as "an exemplary incident which, in one moment, allows different temporalities to emerge, and with them, a range of issues hitherto suppressed" (qtd. at xvii and xvi). [2] The disinterred medieval body marks a profound disruption, a "history-making" moment that the popular media reports as having the potential to revise broad master narratives: rethinking the shifting perceptions of the monarch over time, both demonizing and apologetic (flip through the gallery HERE); providing an alternate timeline for the Reformation (end of the article HERE); or what you will. On a more immediate level, the fact is that this body's disinterment radically reconfigures social relations and lived space. The dis-covered (revealed, uncovered) body in the car park has cascading effects, obliging drivers and commuters find alternative sites and modes of transit. Richard III now "spills over" into media, online and social (the Richard III Society is going bonkers about this on Facebook, and check out the endless "Richard III parking violation" memes e.g. here and here). And, on a very material level, the disinterred Richard III physically transforms the local landscape (Leicester is, among other things, building new Richard III attraction across from the car park itself).

Distemporality entails necessary disjunctions and material differences between modes of living, attending not so much to "time out of joint" but a profoundly disjointed materiality to time itself (the many "riffs" that Derrida enacts upon this idea are illuminative. Even with all the varied translations and explications he provides for this one Shakespearean line, the corporeal element of the "joint" remains occluded: he readily marks this "joint" as referring to a door but can also potentially suggest a body). [3]

Perhaps the "discovery" is not so much an uncovering or recovery but rather a strategy of covering-differently. Re-construction of Richard III's face superimposed upon the skull (HERE with gallery HERE) resembles quite a few familiar premodern portraits, yet his features have been strikingly domesticated: he appears attractive, young, and "rehabilitated."

It is my impression that media coverage loves "the car park" angle (it always comes up that he was discovered there!) because of the rhetorical and cognitive effect that very site creates: this sense of a collision, explosion, or "clash" between a mundane modern space and an extraordinary medieval body -- and an unexpected sensational contact between times. But it's not that the modern space just gives us new (or renewed) access to the materiality of the past; this dismodern body actively reconfigures modern materiality as well.

Getting closer? Richard III excavation in major news coverage (articles HERE and HERE)

Accessing Richard III

I've had discussions with medievalists who have said that this whole "Richard III thing" -- especially the whole obsession with the car park discovery, excavation, and transformative sense of history -- resonates with a Middle English text known as St. Erkenwald: in this text, construction work on the "New Werke" in the "metropol" and "mayster-town" of London unearths the tomb of a pagan judge, and much solemnity occurs. Karl (see HERE) has already written in rich and nuanced ways about this poem as a narrative that (among other things) features discovered body from a prior age that radically reconfigures time and community. If I had the time/energy, I would say more about this too -- but in this discussion I'd like to pivot the question of how we move through time to access Richard III himself.

As I see the media coverage of this story, I must admit that something that irks me -- identifying as a medievalist here -- and it's the tendency for Richard III to be referenced as one of "Shakespeare's" kings. (You can take practically any article about the Richard III hullaballoo and find it a challenge not find some reference to Shakespeare in it somewhere!) Due the imaginative power the Bard holds in the popular imagination, there's a palpable sense that this late medieval monarch is always/already filtered through an formative early modern representational lens -- and so much of the discussion about accessing the "real" Richard III effectively "digs itself out" from underneath layers and layers of Shakespearean mediation. In all the talk about "rehabilitating" Richard III (with all its uncomfortable implications for his alleged deformity and the social meanings attached to his forms of somatic difference), we can't access a truly "medieval" Richard III  -- even if we have the body. [4] Our access to Richard III (always-already) acknowledges -- in dutiful, obligatory, perhaps even perfunctory ways -- the disruptive and intervening presence of the influential Shakespearean manifestation.

Some performances of Shakespeare's "Richard III." Only relatively recently has this role been inhabited by disabled actors and/or actors using prosthetic devices. Clockwise from left: Antony Sher (RSC, 1984); Kevin Spacey (Old Vic, London, 2011); Henry Holden (Spoon Theater, New York, 2007).

Transtemporal Embodiment

The discovery of Richard III's body and "what it all means" will continue for some time. Just to end, I'd like to briefly consider the implications this has for reorienting how we think about Shakespeare's "Richard III" and its the very material consequences that the king's body might have for disability and performance. Scholarship about Shakespeare's Richard III that engages with disability studies is becoming increasingly common. Katherine Schaap Williams, for instance, offers a very engaging first gambit (available HERE for everyone at Disability Studies Quarterly, an open access journal). [5] She offers astute readings of crucial passages in the play that refer to the maligned king's deformity and remarkable modes of embodiment, all the while, "with deliberate anachronism," adapting Lennard Davis' notion of the "dismodern subject" (which Davis developed within a 19th-century historical context). But to approaching the Shakespearean work as a performative bridge between performance and disability studies, we could say that this play -- no matter who inhabits the role -- will always feature multiple temporalities at play in single body: the present performance, early modern language, medieval king -- and we can pay more attention to how these temporalities collide or co-inhabit shared space. In performance, temporalities move unevenly and via disparate means. In these images above, we gain some hint of how performances can mobilize quirky, discordant assemblages of temporally-marked signs concurrently -- including a conspicuous clash between the use of "period" costume with disruptively anachronistic prosthetics like modern crutches or futuristic technologies.

Rather than a queer "touch" across time, the dis-covery of Richard III's body helps us attend to how temporalities move (slide, bounce, connect, and shuffle): we can think about how they not only engage in modes of rearrangement but also jostle together and collaborate in an unpredictable dance. To adapt Puar from a different context, we can think in terms of "spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements" (205), inhabiting a world in which temporalities "interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to each other" (205). [6] Times, in other words, are anything but static: they enact co-movements that register as awkward, intimate, explosive, beautiful, or all of the above.

[1] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011.
[2] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
[3] "A disjointed or disadjusted now, 'out of joint,' a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable" (1). Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuff. Routledge, 1996 (orig. publ. Spectres de Marx, Editions Gailée, 1993); door hinge reading on p. 20.
[4] (And depending on how much faith you place in DNA analysis, there could still be an "if"...)
[5] Katherine Schaap Williams, "Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III." Disability Studies Quarterly 29, 4 (2009); full text HERE.
[6] I deliberately adapt the original quotation here. Puar refers to "representational economies, within which bodies [my emphasis] interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to one another" (205).

Curiosity, Mars/Venus, and Chaucer

by JONATHAN HSY

ABOVE: Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe, which the Oxford English Dictionary cites as providing one of the first attestations of "curiosité" in English. From the Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1864), illus. Edward Burne-Jones. BELOW: NASA's "Curiosity" Rover, on Mars. [My mashup of images from here and here (see entry dated 09.16.10).]

The fact that there's a NASA robotic rover traversing Mars -- and that it bears the name "Curiosity" -- makes me, well, more than a little bit curious to follow the story (and the pop culture tangents, memes, and obsessions it generates). I marvel at the awesomeness of the scientists who helped launch, direct, and land this rover  -- including that one Mission Control staffer with the rockin' star-themed mohawk. It's also quite fun to track the trajectories of the very cleverly personified "Curiosity" on twitter, who tweets photos and sporadic bursts of narrative in an engaging first-person voice (see the MarsCuriosity twitter feed). [1] I happen to find all this buzz so distractingly exciting, and given the current media obsession over this Martian rover it seems quite fitting that NASA settled on the name "Curiosity" for this mission. While previously launched NASA rovers were given names like "Spirit" and "Opportunity" -- abstract nouns that transform scientific missions into allegories of human triumph and ingenuity -- "Curiosity" carries a qualitatively different type of emotional impact, suggesting not so much grandiose ideals as pleasure and interest in the new. In my mind, this name "Curiosity" suggests that a scientific mission with clear objectives and measurable outcomes is ultimately grounded in -- and continues to generate -- an unmeasurable sense of wonder and enthusiasm. Rather than implying idle pursuits, the name "Curiosity" encapsulates something much more profound: it suggests the creative potential of our communal and unending fascination with "the new."

The name of the rover also makes me -- a true Chaucerian at heart -- want to reflect for a moment upon one of the earliest appearances of the word "curiosité" in English: in particular, its usage at the final few lines (envoy) of Chaucer's so-called "Complaint of Venus." [2] In this work, the poet masterfully adapts a French lyric by Oton de Graunson and he ends with this claim (tongue in cheek of course): "Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete" Chaucer can barely manage to "folow word by word the curiosité / Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce" (80-82). In this post -- mostly as a thought experiment -- I'd like to consider these (related) questions: 1. What exactly does "curiosité" mean for Chaucer at this moment in the poem? and 2. How might a medieval understanding of the word "curiosité" change how we understand the poet, or (more broadly) how we think about the art and science of translation?

The term "curiosité," first of all, needs a bit of unpacking, as its meaning and usage have shifted considerably over time. In Middle English as well as in its modern usage, the word can connote a general sense of "inquisitiveness" -- and in a medieval spiritual sense of excessive interest in worldly things, it could (in some contexts) be used pejoratively. [3] But to medieval people - as the Middle English Dictionary citation of this very line from Chaucer indicates - "curiosité" could also entail an aesthetic quality as well: a sense of "skilled or clever workmanship, elegance (of workmanship), beauty (of a work of art)" - see quotations listed in def. 1(b). [4] A related sense of the word suggests an attention to detail: the Oxford English Dictionary's first attestation of "curiosité" as a personality trait, i.e. "careful attention to detail; scrupulousness; exactness, accuracy," comes (curiously enough) from Chaucer's masterpiece of translation-and-technical-writing, A Treatise on the Astrolabe: "To knowe the degree of the sonne by thy diet, for a maner curiosite" [Cambr. Dd.3.53] (def. I.2). Technical precision is indeed a virtue that nicely informs both the work of medieval poets as well as NASA scientists. In glancing through these MED and OED definitions, I wonder if these different senses of the word "curiosité" are really as disparate as they might appear. My sense is that Chaucer's "curiosité" implies poetic translation requires not only a skilled attention to detail but also a roving desire, pleasure, and joy in non goal-oriented exploration. [5]

Mobilizing and instilling curiosity is something that many of us hope to do as teachers. In my undergraduate Chaucer course, I always starts with a judicious sampling of his lyrics, a dream vision or two, selected Canterbury Tales, and ends with some prose works (including the Treatise on the Astrolabe -- yes! Chaucer and his son Lewis were very curious about the cosmos!). In this progression, the "Complaint of Venus" appears very early on -- and I feel it's a good starting point as any for thinking about how an English Chaucer positions himself his relationship to French (Continental) peers. What I always try get students interested in (some times more successfully than others!) is all the extra stuff that Chaucer does with the French text that exceeds any "mere" translation of source material. Most conspicuously: Graunson's verses praise a woman; the corresponding Chaucerian lines praise a man. Here's Graunson: "Il a en lui beauté, bonté, et grace / Plus que nulz homs ne saroit deviser ... Onques ne vy si plaisant jeune dame / De toutes gens avoir si noble fame ..." [There is in her beauty, goodness, and grace / More than any man could devise ... Never have I seen such a happy young lady / To have such a noble name from all people] (9-10, 14-15). And here's Chaucer: "In him is bounte, wysdom, governaunce, / Wel more than any mannes wit can geese ... Thereto so wel hath formed him Nature / That I am his for ever, I him assure" (9-10, 14-15) [6] I usually ask my students something along these lines: What is Chaucer "up to" in changing the gender framework in his translation?

Chaucer's gender-bending gambit here usually opens up to some sort of discussion (in my experience anyway) of how an artist creates (or inhabits) a "new" voice through poetic translation. If we see Chaucer scripting the first-person lyric speaker as a woman, then what's happening is something along the lines of "I'm imagining a new life for this poem in English by also imagining I'm a woman." I'd say Chaucer effectively re-orients the geospatial coordinates of this poem through this re-gendering topos. To put it another way, Chaucer enacts a lyric trope (turn, twist, device) -- and when the rhyme-word "curiosité" appears near the end of the envoy, these lines re-route the entire lyric utterance toward a new audience not in France but in England. [8] Chaucer of course is never "faithful" in his translations (any so-called "derivative" text can never be a perfect reincarnation of the "source"), and this re-routed trajectory of "Venus" shows how even the most technically precise translation -- one that adheres to the rigorous standards of rhyme, meter, and form -- can simultaneously be roving and exploratory. I'd venture to say that the envoy's invocation of "curiosité" activates the dual resonance of the word as attention to detail and expansive wandering. In the poem's transmutation of gendered positioning, the poet demonstrates that translation is never "straight," a linear path from point A to point B. If anything, poetic translation charts circuitous orbits that are awesome, beautiful, scientific, exploratory, and (shall we say?) bi-curious.

[1] If we want to push things further, could we say that the CuriosityRover twitter feed constructs an enthusiastic, episodic, and disorienting first-person account of travel - much like the work attributed to one medieval traveler, Sir John Mandeville?

[2] I say "so-called" because the speaker in "Complaint of Mars" expressly invokes Venus as the addressee (second line), but the speaker in "Complaint of Venus" never identifies "Mars" by name. (It is fun to think - for the purposes of this discussion - that this poem could actually be an address to Mars!)

[3] On curiositas as a spiritual (and affective) concept, see Jamie Taylor, "Curiositas, Desire, and the Book of Margery Kempe." Mediaevalia 31, 1 (July 2011): 106-122.

[4] John Gower also claims his Confessio Amantis lacks "curiosite" (artful skill), despite the conspicuous coexistence of virtuoso Latin elegaic verses and Middle English couplets in his text; see Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (U Minnesota P, 2003), p. 57.

[5] Side note: Does (Chaucerian) "curiosité" function differently in a scientific manual vs. in a literary work?

[7] French citations and translations here follow University of Pennsylvania, French MS 15, ed.  James Wimsatt [I; MS #30].

[8] The idea that courtly lyric is a message "sent" to a particular audience in one place or another makes some sense given that Chaucer was not only a poet but a frequent, bi-directional Channel-crosser; in his role as a diplomatic envoy he was sent on missions to France and other locations the Continent. See Craig Bertolet, "Chaucer's Envoys and the Poet-Diplomat," The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 66-89.

The Fourth Culture

by J J Cohen

Last night I rushed to get my son Alex to his 7.30 fencing practice. I grabbed Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist to bring with me, because there is only so much epée-rattling I can watch in a ninety minute period. I had finished long ago almost all of the book, except for the concluding chapter on Virginia Woolf. Lehrer's argument: Woolf realized that the self is an imaginary but necessary entity that makes coherent the chaotic onslaught of experience. Self, in other words, is a kind of retroactive effect of the choosing of what phenomena comes to attention and what is lost to the world's plenitude. In Lehrer's account, Woolf mapped this out artistically long before contemporary neuroscience did with CAT scans, brain lesion study, and experiments.

It's an intriguing chapter -- and the clanging of epées, the shouting, the adolescent jokes, and the general maelstrom of sensory stumuli that fencing practice generates really did emphasize for me the material bombardment from which we extract a narrative of being singular and choosing.

The book's coda makes explicit an argument that has been running quietly throughout Proust was a Neuroscientist. Whereas C. P. Snow argued in 1959 that we require a third culture, one that bridge the noncommunicating realms of art and science, those scientists who have self-appointed themselves as this culture (especially Steven Pinker) carry a fair amount of animus towards the humanities, believing it enough if they communicate their science directly to the masses. Lehrer argues that not only does such a third culture misrepresent what Snow imagined, it often gets the humanists wrong (and misapprehends their artistic sources as well) by not having listened or read attentively. Lehrer therefore calls for a fourth culture, a space of true collaboration, and it is that call I'd like to quote this morning:

[A fourth culture] seeks to discover the relationships between the humanities and the sciences. This fourth culture, much closer in concept to Snow's original definition (and embodied by works like [Ian McEwan's] Saturday), will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but by its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has been solved? ... While science will always be our primary method of investigating the universe, it is naïve to think that science alone can solve everything itself, or that everything can even be solved ... When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art ... No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge.

Lehrer's words here are powerful. His call to collaboration and dialogue is, I think, answered in part by initiatives like the Qu(e)ering series, the BABEL project, postmedieval. Like Lily's art in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, we need to keep seeking the "queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow," that "sudden intensity."