Fire Rocks

Aberdeen Bestiary Folio 93v detail

 by J J Cohen

[Jonathan and I were composing posts at the same time. Don't miss his piece on Global Chaucers]

I'm emerging from my writing lockdown for a moment to share with you a bit from a chapter in progress, which contains a long sequence on the history of gendered stones -- a phenomenon dating in lapidary tradition back to its origin in Theophrastus:

"For one type of sardion, which is translucent and of a redder color, is called the female, and the other, which is translucent and darker, is called the male. And it is the same with the varieties of the lyngourion, for the female is more transparent and yellow than the other. Also, one kind of kyanos is called male and the other female, and the male is the darker of the two." (Theophrastus, On Stones)

Theophrastus doesn't make much of lithic gendering, nor connect a possible petric sexuality to a statement he makes at the beginning of On Stones about "stones which give birth to young." It's a weak kind of anthropomorphism, since little is really at stake: gendered stones are a neutral fact. They don't become more apprehensible via gender, and they don't act in a more human way for their sexual dimorphism.

This tension between a seeming anthropomorphism and a rocky indifference to limiting ambits manifests repeatedly in lapidary history. Marbodes of Rennes writes of a stone called the peanita, which conceives through an unknown mechanism and gives birth to lithic young. Alchemy genders metals as a generative principle. Albertus Magnus invokes gendered categories within a strangely creaturely vocabulary to explain the genesis of stones. Lapidaries are texts full of lithic vitality, so it is perhaps not overly surprising to find rocks gendered within them. It is startling, however, to find lively stones dwelling among animals.

The Physiologus, concerned mainly with how various animals offer spiritual allegories, bestows to the bestiary tradition a discussion of gendered piroboli or Fire Rocks. Interpreted as the carnal sins to which men and women are together drawn, the piroboli are described as “igneous rocks of the masculine and feminine gender” native to the East. Kept at a distance from each other the two types of stones are inert, but should the male approach the female “fire breaks forth and consumes all.” Also called lapides igniferi, these fire stones make frequent appearances in the bestiaries, where they find themselves in the good company of the phoenix, elephants, panthers, beavers, foxes, weasels, bees, dragons, sirens and hyenas. Lapidaries were sometimes bound with bestiaries, and it is not difficult to see why: the rocks of the latter can be as lively and restless as any creature contained in zoological compendia.

Aberdeen Bestiary 94r detail

Whereas lapidaries are usually content to allow stones to be stones, however, the bestiaries render fire rocks fully anthropomorphic. They are almost always depicted as a human couple embracing in the midst of flames, an allegorical and narrative-laden representation in which nothing of the lithic remains. Typically these figures are naked, but sometimes these stones in corporeal form are clothed (e.g., St John's College Cambridge A.15 103v). Since humans are made from earth just like stones, these representations make good biblical sense – and since fire is an easy allegory for lust, a devoutly Christian story contained in stone writes itself.[1] In the Aberdeen Bestiary, for example, the fire stones are fully humanized: a nude man and woman combust in a garden meant to recall Eden (f 93v). Yet Aberdeen balances its lithic representations. Flip the page and you are met by a depiction of a lone rock atop a green hill (f 94r). This solitary stone is adamas, the diamond, most impenetrable of materials, the most withholding, its loneliness a rebuke perhaps to the blazing gregariousness of its siblings. Adamas dwells indifferent to human worlds and fiery futurity on its placid summit. Perhaps it exists out of time, or at least out of human time.

Few depictions of fire rocks are content to leave them in lithic solitude, to add nothing anthropomorphic. Yet a surprisingly nonhuman, nonnarrative representation of fire stones appears in the bestiary of Harley 3244 (f. 60, image apparently not digitized by the BL). Debra Hassig describes the illustration well: “five evenly separated red and orange stones, glowing like embers, are distributed along a light green mountainside” as if in a landscape portrait (Medieval Bestiaries 117). These fire rocks sparkle with a promise of vitality on the slope of that verdant hill, but they have not yet ignited into story. They thrum with compacted energy, pulse with the promise of magnificent detonation. Some lapides igniferi are neither fully human nor fully petric, creating a jarring hybridity as human visages peer from lithic chunks. The bestiary held by Gonville and Caius College [2] offers two dark stones with petals like petric flowers against a monochrome background, yielding the impression that the rocks are moving towards each other across space or sky. In the centers of these stones are intricate and expressive faces, one male and one female, each uneasily eying the other as flames begin to erupt. They seem keenly aware of the explosion about to arrive ... and yet they remind me of Anne Harris's suggestion that fire stones might also laugh.

Kellie Robertson argues that hybridity is innate to the lithic-human encounter. She provides vivid readings of this hybridity's eruption in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, observing that “In a medieval world where rocks were not merely passive objects of the human gaze, but active participants in shaping the mental reality of percipients, rocks have the capacity to organize the humans who look at them, based on what they see, rather than being simply subject to human desire” (“Exemplary Rocks” 106). Some bestiaries go farther, bringing lithic vitality into wholly unexpected – and dangerously combustive – realms, spaces in which easy assumptions about what it means to be human or alive fall apart. Rocks are anthropomorphized not with the effect that the petric becomes more knowable, or assimilated into the human, but stone instead is removed from that constrictive familiarity which prevents realization of its queerness. As the lithic flowers with perplexed human faces in the Gonville and Caius College bestiary suggest, their visages registering bemusement at an incineration that has already begun, the lithic abides in marvelously inscrutable spaces – so alien, in fact, that the fire bearers [lapides igniferi] themselves seem puzzled by a combustive future just starting to arrive.


NOTES
[1] Kellie Robertson acutely observes “These anthropomorphizing accounts of fire-producing stones suggest a natural world motivated by recognizably human desires and behaviors. The habit of moralizing rocks in this way seems to reduce the inanimate object to a screen on which the human is projected in grainy but recognizable form” (‘Exemplary Rocks” 93). Robertson argues against such reductive reading (rocks are more than humans in “petric drag”) by pointing out that “this allegorized world is one of mutual, rather than unidirectional, influence” (94): both rocks and humans are changed by their proximity and relations.

[2] As far as I can tell Gonville and Caius College has not digitized any of its manuscripts, so I cannot link to an image here.

Global Chaucers

by JONATHAN HSY

Clockwise from left: Chaucer adaptations in Czech (Škvorecký 1948, 1996), 

French (Ray 1963), Dutch (Bey 2009), and Nigerian pidgin English (Overo-Tarimo 2012).

My previous posting offered a blurb on a new adaptation of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Francesca Abbate's Troy, Unincorporated (2012) transports the medieval tale to a modern setting (unincorporated town of Troy, Wisconsin) and gives also gives the story a new form: it becomes a series of lyric monologues in modern English sections prefaced by an epitaph in Chaucer's own Middle English.

This artistic interest in "making Chaucer anew" -- or fusing the new and old -- is an enduring phenomenon. Indeed, there's a long and rich history of Chaucer adaptation and re-appropriation in American culture writ large. Candace Barrington's American Chaucers (2007), for instance, has traced how aspects of The Canterbury Tales have been adapted and re-purposed to in a surprising range of American contexts including anthologies, plays and pageants, and children's literature. And a number of medievalists -- Steve Ellis, Tom Prendergast, and Stephanie Trigg, to name a few -- have examined Chaucer's manifold adaptation and translation (in all senses of this word) into modern English-speaking contexts well beyond the US. Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (2007), ed. by Eileen, Myra Seaman, Kimberly Bell, and Mary Ramsey, features (among many things) an excellent cover image of Chaucer "busting out of the frame" of an old portrait into a brand new digital realm. And David Wallace's Presidential Address at the New Chaucer Society (NYC 2006) offered an early hint of where a wider Chaucerian reception history -- and scholarly engagement with online sources -- would be headed (see the discussion of "New Chaucer Topographies" in Jeffrey's ITM posting).

But what of Chaucerian adaptations into new contexts outside the English-speaking world? How might a turn to non-Anglophone appropriations of Chaucer offer new ways of re-thinking Chaucerian narratives or otherwise reorient how we think about the relationship between the world we now inhabit and materials from the distant (English) past?

Candace Barrington and I are happy to announce we are joining forces in an attempt to answer these questions. Specifically, we are launching an (admittedly ambitious) project called Global Chaucers: its ultimate mission is to examine Chauceriana from outside the Anglophone world, with our first step being to identify and catalog all post-1945 non-English adaptations of The Canterbury Tales. Candace announced her interests in a "global Chaucer reception project" during her talk at the New Chaucer Society in Portland earlier this summer, and after her presentation I informed her that I had been thinking about a similar endeavor for quite some time (but didn't know how to start). Over the past few months, we have been working together – with the help of colleagues in many locations – to gather information on modern Chaucerian adaptations in languages other than English. So far, we've identified adaptations in (Mandarin) Chinese, Czech, Flemish, French, German, Esperanto, Nigerian pidgin English, (Brazilian) Portuguese, and (Bolivian) Spanish; and these adaptations take many forms: short stories, poem collections, comic books, and dramatic performances. We want to begin the process of gathering information about these works together in one place and also help to facilitate broader, more informed discussions of Chaucer reception across different cultures.

Here's a little blurb about the project (excerpted from grant proposals we've been writing):

Simply put, the Global Chaucers project asks what we can learn by engaging non-Anglophone appropriations of Chaucer. As scholars working with Chaucerian reception have long recognized, modernizations demonstrate how the poet's difficult alterity and canonical cachet combine to create a chameleon text suitable for adaptation to multiple concerns and values. Other medievalists have noted Chaucer’s awareness of his own “belatedness” in his own time; that is, he understood he was a poet inventing a new literary tradition in English in the wake of more prestigious Latin, French, or Italian models. The work of cultural adaptation that Chaucerian material serves in postcolonial contexts – areas where “new” nations are articulating a sense of identity that is both informed by and resists more powerful cultural models – is a potential point of contact between Chaucer’s own period and post-1945 settings.

On its broadest level, this project sets the stage for theorizing circuits of translation in creative and more nuanced ways. For instance, post-Chaucerian adapters working in French, Flemish, or Italian can end up almost transforming Chaucer “back into” the original non-English sources he engaged. Reorienting Chaucer’s own French-derived work via modern French adaptations might suggest a new understanding of the “place” of French in Chaucer’s own time. When an amateur linguist adapts Chaucer into an artificial language like Esperanto (by definition a “new” and invented tongue), does this mean he must create archaisms and back-formations? When a living playwright creates a song and dance adaptation of The Miller’s Tale in Nigerian pidgin English, how does she accommodate an ethnically diverse Anglophone audience with disparate frames of reference? The Global Chaucers project, in other words, has the potential to generate questions that we have not yet asked – or even knew that we could ask.

For more information on the goals and aims of our project, see the Global Chaucers website! 

At this point, we are hoping to identify any ITM readers who might wish to participate in the project. If you've discovered a non-English work of Chaucerian adaptation and would like to tell us about it, please email us at this address. If you have skills and interests in a particular language and would like to get involved in translation or offering an analysis of a non-Anglophone Chaucerian adaptation, please let us know.

We've also created a Global Chaucers page on Facebook, and we would like to use both venues (blog and Facebook page) to create a community for people interested in Chaucer adaptation.

We hope that the Global Chaucers website will become a resource and a community for people with interests in Chaucer reception -- and we'd welcome participation from anyone who would like to get involved.

Chaucer in Wisconsin

by JONATHAN HSY

This posting (and the next) both deal with Chaucer reception. I had originally conceived of these posts as a single entry but I've decided to split them into two separate ones.

Transporting Troilus and Criseyde. On left, Francesca Abbate's Troy, Unincorporated (2012); on right, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896), ed. William Morris and illus. Edward Burne-Jones.

If the previous post by Karl is any indication, it's now the time of year when many of us our planning our syllabi for the spring semester. I'm devising a new upper-division literature course called "Epic and Romance," and I'm seriously considering assigning this new book that has just been brought to my attention [h/t Lisa Cooper!]. Even if it turns out I can't manage to squeeze this onto the syllabus this time around, I have already made the book the first item on my own personal reading list.

Francesca Abbate's new book Troy, Unincorporated (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a modern-day "refraction" of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Set in the unincorporated town of Troy, Wisconsin, this series of lyric monologues re-imagines Chaucer's tale of love and betrayal.

I provide the complete blurb from the publisher's website (you can also flip through a preview on Google Books):

A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer’s tragedy Troilus and Criseyde. The tale’s unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted “historic” downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover, suffers from the weeps, or, in more modern terms, depression. Pandarus, the hard-working catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer’s poem, is here a car mechanic. 

Chaucer’s narrator tells a story he didn’t author, claiming no power to change the course of events, and the narrator and characters in Troy, Unincorporated struggle against a similar predicament. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, they are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures—tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, though Troy, Unincorporated follows Chaucer’s plot—Criseyde falls in love with Diomedes after leaving Troy to live with her father, who has broken his hip, and Troilus dies of a drug overdose—it moves beyond Troilus’s death to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this “litel spot of erthe.”

Francesca Abbate is an English professor at Beloit College; read more about her experiences and the inspiration for her book here. This promises to be an exciting read, and I look forward to finding out how Abbate engages with the Chaucerian text. It intrigues me not just as a piece of Chauceriana, but as (in the words of Barbara Berman) "the work of an academic/artist making the old new, making contemporary experience into something alive, one would wish, for a very long time."

* My sincere apologies to any ITM readers who saw the original posting which erroneously misidentified the town in question as Troy, Michigan. (I attribute this mistake to a late-night conversation over Facebook: one of my colleagues was saying she wished the book were set in Troy, MI, instead - until I informed her that there is indeed a real unincorporated town in Wisconsin called "Troy" and that the author herself lives and works in Wisconsin.)