A Day Late and Somethin' Short: Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

. . . as scholars and teachers we believe we are right to call what we do “humanistic” and what we teach “the humanities.” Are these still serviceable phrases, and if so in what way? How then may we view humanism as an activity in light of its past and probable future?
—Edward Said

Other than sneaking out of the house on Friday morning to get coffee and write my last post, I have been holed up in my dining room [see photograph below] since Wednesday evening forcing myself to finish the book proposal for BABEL's next volume, Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism, a volume of essays that brings together essays by eleven medievalists [including me, JJC, Karl, and other assorted ITM rogues and vagabonds], an early modernist, a Victorianist posing as an art historian of the paleolithic era, an Enlightenment era intellectual historian, a queer theorist, a fiction writer, a psychotherapist, and a biologist [it's a behemoth, by god]. I had promised myself [and others] that this would be finished the first week of November. Oops [but isn't that pretty tame, anyway, by the usual standards of academic procrastination, I mean, overextension?]. I am starting to feel psychotic [and seriously unwashed] but am thrilled to announce that I finished the hellish task today, circa 7:00 p.m. central standard time, and the results are here:

Book Proposal: Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

Here is a brief precis, but more [juicy] content, obviously, awaits you via the link above:

It is precisely to Cary Wolfe’s hope of a theoretical posthumanism that would pay better attention to the difference between historicity and an unreflective historicism, and to Katherine Hayles’s assertion that certain aspects of the posthuman can only ever be modern (or, driven by certain post-19th-century technologies), that our volume of essays, Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanisms, addresses itself. More specifically, we want to begin filling in what we believe has been a definitive lacunae, or gap, in posthumanist studies more generally: the absence of a theoretically rigorous longer or slower (premodern) historical perspective. Many of the contemporary discourses on posthumanism have mainly focused on the ways in which new findings in fields such as biotechnology, neuroscience, and computing have complicated how we believe we are enacting our human “selves,” ushering in the language of crisis over the supposed destabilization of the category “human” in its biological, social, and political aspects (the futurist-dystopic view). Or they have concentrated on a theoretical reform of a humanistic tradition of thought (from the Renaissance through modernity) believed to have produced, in Iain Chambers’ words, an oppressive “history of possessive subjectivism” (the self-critical philosophical view). Or, finally, in some circles (primarily scientific, but also cultural, studies) the same posthuman turn has led to a language of hope and elation over all of the ways in which we—whatever “we” might be—might finally be able to escape or somehow make less vulnerable or more joyful the death-haunted “trap” of our all-too-human bodies (the futurist-utopic view). But what is missing from most of these discourses, even when they claim to address the question of history, historicism, or historicity, are what we would call the incorporated dialogue of scholars who have a deep expertise in premodern studies (antiquity through the Middle Ages), for while “the past” is often invoked and (crudely) drawn in contemporary theory, it is rarely visited via the route of, or unsettled by, actual scholarship in premodern studies—scholarship, moreover, that in recent years has been equally concerned with issues of the human and the animal, self and subjectivity, cognition and affectivity, singularity and networks, corporality and embodiment, and in a theoretically sophisticated manner that also calls into question the “straight” teleologies and causal explanations of a traditional, or in Wolfe’s terms, an unreflective historicism.

In order to make sure I wouldn't leave the house [to drink wine at Erato or see Enchanted at the Tivoli Theater, etc.], I went to Blockbuster and rented the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica. I must confess that [and yes, I realize this is contrary to all the usual tendencies of medievalists], while I have always had a penchant for post-apocalytpic-type or technoscience-type narratives [such as Stephen King's The Stand or David Cronenberg's Existenz], that I have always always always abhorred any story or novel or movie that takes place on a spaceship in space. Seriously. I always hated Star Trek. Always. But so many people kept telling me how good Battlestar Galactica is, and I convinced myself that, since I was working on a prospectus for a book on posthumanism that, certainly, a much-lauded television series about the almost-end of the human world at the hand of intelligent machines who have taken on human form was apropos to my state of mind [and project]. But do you know what happens after watching, say, four or five straight hours of such a show for four nights in row? I see Cylons. Everywhere [those who watch the show will get this joke]. Happy holidays.

The Weight of History, A World without Force, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Figure 1. still image from The Wind That Shakes the Barley [Teddy O'Donovan, played by Padriac Delaney, now part of the Free State Irish Army, about to give orders for the execution of his brother, Damien O'Donovan, a leader in the IRA, played by Cillian Murphy]

I have for a while now been putting off viewing Ken Loach's gorgeous and tragic film about the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and Civil War (1922-23), The Wind That Shakes the Barley [which won the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 2006], likely because in my family "texts" such as these are treated as sacred objects over which no critical discussion is ever allowed. For this reason, I never saw the film Michael Collins, mainly because [and it embarrasses me to admit this] my father raved about the greatness of its subject for so long and I guess you could say I have this deeply-seated antipathy toward hagiographic views of history [whether we are talking about Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jesus]. The subject is sensitive in my family partly because my father's doctoral dissertation was an edition of my mother's father's memoirs, Victory and Woe: The West Limerick Brigade in the War of Independence [University College Dublin Press, 2002]--I should point out here that my father is not Irish, but my mother is, and she and my father met in the late 1950s when my mother was working for the Irish Embassy in D.C. and my father was working as an aide to Robert Kennedy, and hence the continually roiling radical liberalist passions of my family. My grandfather, Maurice [Mossie] Hart, was the commanding officer of the West Limerick Brigade of the Irish Volunteers [later absorbed into the Irish Republican Forces, then into the IRA], in which capacity he participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 that inspired Yeats' poem of the same name. Later, he joined the Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and was captured and placed in a Free State prison until 1923. He very well might have been executed there, in which case my mother would have never been born and I wouldn't be writing this weblog post, but it's not something I've ever dwelled upon until after seeing Loach's movie, which I viewed last night.

Although I know [and everyone who knows me knows] that I am what is a called an "emotional" person, I was not quite prepared for the feelings that coursed through me while watching The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It was a devastating experience, partly because of its frank treatment of violence, including torture, but more so for the statement it seemed to be making regarding the inevitability of violence and the difficult questions it poses regarding whether or not violence and force are always necessary for securing freedom and liberty [and more pointedly, whether or not it might sometimes be necessary to kill your own brother to achieve "peace"]. When my father was editing my grandfather's memoirs, which he did not get around to doing until the late 1990s, he asked me to read an early draft. My first impression was that my grandfather was a terrible writer. His style was completely unadulterated and plain and declarative, and "minimalist" would be too kind a description. But I kept these thoughts to myself since my grandfather had already attained "saint" status for my father who, to this day, never goes anywhere without wearing his Sinn Fein pin [which is also fairly extraordinary since my father's ancestry is thoroughly Dutch and British and when he married my mother her family refused to attend the wedding because my father was not Irish and not Catholic; he later won them over]. I must confess here that I never actually finished reading the memoir [even to this day] because of one passage in particular. It concerned my grandfather and other "regulars" in his troop sneaking out to a house in the remote countryside to surprise the inhabitants while still asleep. The owner of the house, an Irish farmer, was the brother of an officer of the Irish Constabulary who had been responsible for killing one of my grandfather's comrades. So, for revenge, my grandfather and his men were going to wake this officer's brother up and kill him, which if I recall correctly, they did. I stopped reading and perhaps I don't have all the details right. I didn't, and don't, care. When my father asked me what I thought, at the dinner table with relatives present [because it was Thanksgiving], I said the book demonstrated to me the true nature of all wars, and that at the moment my grandfather was crouching in the tall grass outside that farmhouse, he had ceased to be a freedom fighter and was, instead, a terrorist. I don't remember exactly what happened next but I'm pretty sure it involved shouting and screaming and me being told that I was an idiot, and perhaps I was.

But watching Loach's movie reconfirmed for me, in a way, my initial sentiments about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War that followed: in the end, violence corrupts everyone it touches, or as Damien tells his lover Sinead in the movie, after having to shoot a young Irish man in the heart because he was a "traitor" to the Irish cause [even though it's clear he is an "innocent" who simply yielded to force from the other side because, in the end, he didn't have a choice], "I can't feel anything." Yes, we can blame the British for everything bad that happens in the film [and in Irish history], going all the way back to the Middle Ages, but in the end, the Irish turn against each other and destroy everything good and beautiful in each other. But yet another reason I think this movie affected me so much also has to do, again, with my grandfather, and more largely my mother's family and all those who lived in West Limerick during those times [and even today] and with what it must mean [feels to me, has to mean] to live in a place [or time] that bears within itself the burden of a terrible history, or the burden of history, period. History weighs heavily in such places, never lets people forget, and deforms everything it touches [while also, conversely, providing a kind of sustenance of shared memory]. Being white and privileged and American, I do not know what the weight of history feels like. I have no history and no history bears down on me, and that, in a perverse sense, makes me more free than my grandfather could have ever been.

Just this past Monday, my students and I completed our M.A. seminar on "Writing, Race, and the English Nation," with a "cross-temporal" reading of Toni Morrison's novel Paradise. Here is a brief, and for this post, an apropos description of the novel, from Anna Mulrine [U.S. News and World Report 19 Jan. 1998]:

. . . . Morrison wanted to call it War. It begins with a six-shot staccato sentence: "They kill the white girl first." Explains Morrison, "I wanted to open with somebody's finger on the trigger, to close when it was pulled, and to have the whole novel exist in that moment of the decision to kill or not." Knopf feared the title War might turn off Morrison fans. "I'm still not convinced they were right," she says.

Seeking Eden. The new book finishes a trilogy begun with her 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, the tale of a runaway slave who would rather kill her children than see them captured. It was followed by 1992's Jazz, which imitates the musical form's lean dissonance. Paradise completes the trilogy's arc of inquiry into the dangers of excessive love--for children, mates, or God. It also addresses a question that has always intrigued Morrison: "Why paradise necessitates exclusion."

The book is set in all-black Ruby, Okla., founded by settlers who had been turned away by a town of lighter-skinned blacks. It is a community, they hope, insulated from "Out There where every cluster of whitemen looked like a posse." But by 1968, the outside is seeping in, with graffiti of black-power fists and murmurings of illicit abortions. Soon, town residents pinpoint scapegoats for all their ills: five magic-practicing women living in a former convent. These women are not "color coded," as Morrison puts it, and the reader has no way of knowing their race. It is a bold literary device: In struggling to figure out which of the women is white, the reader is forced to ask why that detail even matters.

One of the questions we asked ourselves as a class, after an entire semester spent reading texts [such as Bede's Historia and the Old English Andreas and Gerald of Wales's History and Topography of Ireland and The Book of Margery Kempe] that demonstrate the destructive ways in which groups of persons--aligned along religious, political, "racial," ethnic, national, cultural, gender, sexual, and other lines--attempt to describe and control other groups, how we might be able to somehow envision a "community" that could be constructed on the basis of a "shared history" that could be seen as valuable and worth holding in memory and that would be sustaining and affirmative and not ultimately oppressive and destructive and self-deforming. I know, of course, that there are all sorts of ways in which historically imposed and also self-chosen communities can help individuals to survive under adverse conditions and even thrive in times that are not adverse, but can these communities ever really endure without some notion of exclusion or means of force, and is it always requisite that they must last forever, or their instantiating conditions never be forgotten? One of my students suggested that, perhaps, the best communities would be those that would always be open to and receptive of change, but then they wouldn't always be the "same," but they could determine creative ways to remember or memorialize the past in ways that would not, in my student's words, "institutionalize" that past in tyrannical ways and that would also admit the parts of that history that might not be entirely positive [and this is why, actually, I love Loach's film, because it shows, I really believe, a complex picture of the development of the Irish Republican Army that is both positive and negative and how could the two attributes ever be disentangled, in any history?]. I have my doubts, of course, about the value of community and I will never believe that any community, however formed, will ever be more valuable or "sacred" than the individuals who might run afoul of that group or be mis-recognized by it. So, even though those who fought in the early days of the IRA, like my grandfather, felt that they had to make sacrifices for a larger "cause"--something bigger and better than any of them in their singularity, or so they believed--their cause could not justify the taking of even one life and therefore was doomed from the start. But how, then, are individuals, who belong to groups of oppressed people who are themselves constantly under threat of disenfranchisement and murder, supposed to make their claims heard, when they live in a maelstrom and din of violence? And more importantly, how are they to live?

During dinner, earlier this week, with my friend and colleague Michael Moore, we were talking about his book manuscript [under contract at Penn. State Press], A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and Frankish Royal Power, the revisions of which he is currently knee-deep in. He indicated to me that he felt he was laboring over a kind of sublimely ridiculous project because he was trying to do something no one does any more: write a "big" history, one that makes a claim for certain moments being hugely decisive in the way history turns out [and hopefully Michael will chime in here if he's reading and correct any errors in my memory of our conversation]. Michael further indicated to me that he wants, also, to make an argument [also widely unpopular and currently discreditable, in his view] that "force" is not the most decisive factor in "how things turn out," and the world might be a very different place today if we understood that better. And I don't know if he's right, or wrong, or how it matters.

This being "the season," as they say, for goodness and for memorializing a sacred history that supposedly calls individuals to their better selves, I can't see anything but the bad in it, or in any so-called "sacred" history. History should never be sacred. But it cannot, or should not be, completely forgotten, perhaps partly for the sake of those individuals whose lives were destroyed because that was considered the necessary cost of a history that some believe has to turn out a certain way. For those individuals, on both side of the executioner's rifle or hangman's noose or bomb, the burden of history is always too great.

Decorating to annoy

At this most festive time of the year, the English Department of the George Washington University celebrates the looming solstice through an annual display of kitschy gaudity.

At its center is a Nondenominational Festivus Sprig, a vaguely pine tree-ish creation about two feet high. The Sprig changes color every few seconds via fiber optic wizardry: glaring green, ribald red, awful orange, baleful blue, yipes-it's-yellow, and so on. We also hang the thing's branches with shiny pink, aquamarine, and teal orbs, thus heightening its pleasing aesthetic effect.

The office itself is strung with Hanukkah-colored garlands (blue and silver). At random intervals we have suspended small round ornaments from the ceiling, typically on strings that are too long. The effect of these Tiny Orbs of Menace is to turn the office into an obstacle course. Their thoughts turned to Milton and Woolf and Said, scholars on their way to the copy machine run into the inconveniently suspended objects, giving us a seasonal soundtrack of "Oh!" and "Oops!" and "Ouch!" that plays all the day long.

It is indeed the most wonderful time of the year.

[photo credit: the view from my office. Only the most agile can enter without touching the dangling orb. It's amazing how few people stop by anymore.]

Heavenfield

Heavenfield is an erudite blog filled with interesting rumination on Anglo-Saxon days. Check out this post on Wilfrid and the British Boy. Or this one on the lost kingdom of Craven. Or this on Penda. Good stuff.

An extremely minor holiday devoid of religious significance

Hanukkah has dwindled over the past decade.

An unease arose over its Expansive Powers of Holiday Magnetism -- its penchant to draw to itself the trappings of winter solstice festiveness, trappings previously reserved for pagans and Christians. Jews who once argued that a menorah should be placed alongside the Christmas tree in shopping malls grew suspicious of Hanukkah's prominence. Newspapers now obligingly refer to the holiday as minor, and emphasize that it is a historical commemoration rather than a religious one (footnote: apparently the miracle of eight days of oil belongs to chronicle rather than divinity). Serious Jews will often offer that they don't celebrate the feast, mainly because tradition insists that there really isn't much to celebrate. It is simply not an important component of the ritual year.

Really, though, that downplaying seems to me a reaction against the evident syncretism of the holiday, and its modern growth -- especially as secular Jews attempted to create for themselves something on a par with the all-consuming behemoth of December 25. The dismissal of Hanukkah is hard to disentangle from a dismissal of Jewish secularism.

Who cares if Hanukkah has become so enmeshed within Yule that it is difficult to extricate? Who cares if it is now as much about lighting candles against winter dark -- and, really, lighting the home with the Christians, engaged as they are in their own rituals against the long nights -- as it is the commemoration of a historical act or of a small miracle?

Well, lots of Jews care. It doesn't matter that Jesus likely was not born on December 25, that the day was perhaps chosen to compete with the week of festivating, gift giving, gambling and indulgence the Romans called Saturnalia. Personally, I like the fact that Hanukkah has expanded to fill a space that it did not previously inhabit, that Hanukkah lives and changes. Though I understand the attraction of having ritual commemorations that seem pure and that seem to stretch across the centuries unaltered (even if in actual fact they almost never do), I still prefer my holidays to be ones that breathe. The all too secular Cohens will lighting the family chanukkiah, spinning dreidels and exchanging gifts tonight.

Happy minor historical commemoration to you, readers.

Dissertation Fragments, Part II: Horizons of History

This past week, in the midst of sifting through the fifty times "says Orosius" occurs in the Old English translation of the History against the Pagans, I reached another milestone in my academic life. As I've mentioned elsewhere (follow the link for the abstract!), I was asked back to my alma mater, Wake Forest, to give a talk to their medieval group. It was my first real "academic" talk. The presentation went well -- and I was pleased that it was made among professors and friends who are as dear to me as those at Wake. I got some very productive questions: most notably, and perhaps most interestingly for the dissertation prospectus this talk is going to morph into over the next few days (a transformation I began last week before the talk) was a question about resistance to the use of not only multiple theoretical perspectives but of their use in understanding, speaking of and writing about Old English literature.

It's a question I'm still working out the answer to. At any rate, I've posted the first part of my talk below for your reading enjoyment. Questions, comments and criticism are all welcome (and frankly needed!). I'll be posting the rest of it over the course of the week, while I wrestle with the Old English Orosius and the temporalities of translation for a paper due next Monday. For now, however, I give you The Horizons of History -- or perhaps what ought to be called "Notes Towards a Dissertation." Apologies for randomness of my citational style -- occupational hazard of the oral format I fear.

The Horizons of History: Writing (and Rewriting) Anglo-Saxon Collectivities

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning!

We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes
in the old days, the kings of the tribes—
how noble princes showed great courage!
Often Scyld Scefing seized mead-benches
from enemy troops, from many a clan;
he terrified warriors, even though first he was found
a waif, helpless.For that came a remedy
he grew under heaven, prospered in honors
until every last one of the bordering nations
beyond the whale-road had to heed him,
pay him tribute. He was a good king!

Familiar though they are, for an Anglo-Saxonist the opening lines of Beowulf return like a cherished refrain, calling out across time to form and reform a community of listeners around a well-known text. Indeed, we have heard this story before – in multiple classes where we teach, read, or translate it. And each time it is translated or reworked, we return to a scene of a “telling” – the scene of a tale which is resurrected across historical and linguistic difference, to speak to us in the now.

However, these familiar lines are also the space in which more than one community – or as I will term it collectivity – is formed through the narrative. My use of “collectivity” rather than community bears some explanation: partially informed by the work of Bruno Latour, the term “collectivity” avoids the artificial, vertical distinctions most often drawn between “nature” and “society”, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans. I would suggest, rather, that by allowing all of these (artificially constructed) sets – humans, non-humans, nations, texts, myths – to operate as quasi-objects or actors in what Deleuze and Guattari term the plane of consistency, we might allow for a more dynamic understanding of how ideas, humans, texts, and social groupings interact and operate on equal grounding in the construction of group identities.

Returning to the opening lines Beowulf, then, we begin to see these collectivities taking shape from the very beginning. In the space of less than a dozen lines, the poem identifies at least five separate collectivities which inhabit multiple temporal spaces interlaced not only in this opening but throughout the work. We have the ‏Gar-Dena, those þeod-cyninga, the kings of the people, who form the first. They are a collectivity perceived – or received – by a second, listening group, indicated by the “we” of the first line. Scyld Scefing himself calls the third group into being: because he egsode eorlas, terrified the earls, we now have a collectivity best described as “those who are terrified by Scyld.” The final lines offer two more collectivities, one of which is predicated on Scyld’s actions, and one in which he participates. Scyld Scefing unites those who lie as ymbsittendra (the sitters-about, as it were) or bordering nations, all of whom unite to gomban gyldan – to pay him tribute. Scyld, we are told, wæs god cyning (was a good king). Of the set of good kings, he forms a part.

These collectivities co-habit the first eleven lines of Beowulf – yet they do not exist in a single, identifiable time in history. They inhabit multiple temporalities in the single space of the text. The implications of this for the formation of collectivities (which, remember, can include texts and humans) is most marked with the case of the “we” with whom the poet begins. The word seems to mean, or refer to at least – us: the listeners, the readers, the group which receives stories and texts passed down from geardagum. However, when examined closely, it becomes clear that this is a “we” of whom we can know very little – always shifting, it is reconstituted in and by each poetic utterance. Beowulf, though we read it as a written text, is of course, part of an oral tradition. What is identifiable about this particular collectivity, then, is the action, and not only that of listening. The active identity of the “we” in the first line of Beowulf describes a community via a completed action, and not simply that usual translation of gefrunon, “have heard.” Gefrunon, from the infinitive gefrinan, carries the connotation of a very specific way of gaining knowledge: used only seven times in the corpus, three of which occur in Beowulf, the majority of the uses of the verb involve a sense of what Bosworth-Toller defines as “to learn by action, find out.” Perhaps the most intriguing of these uses occurs in line 76 of The Dream of the Rood: Hwæðre me þær dryhtnes þegnas, freondas gefrunon, gyredon me golde ond seolfre (“Yet the thanes of the lord, the friends found me there, and geared me with gold and silver,” 75-77). Bringing this meaning to gefrunon’s usage in Beowulf has a crucial effect: bound together by what we might even term a quest, “we” have heard of these other collectivities which inhere in the poem not simply because we read it, or stumbled upon the knowledge. “We” learn by asking – we find out, we discover. The poem, then, anticipates our response to the history it represents. It acknowledges a futurity of reception – a time when another “we” will have learned by asking. This “we” – a collectivity already written into the fabric of the poem – constitutes a kind of futurity within Beowulf that posits a world beyond its composition and recitation – a world that will actively engage it in a time which is, for the poem, fundamentally not yet.

As these opening lines of Beowulf suggest, the “time” of the poem embraces a variety of temporalities – from the time of its main actions, to the distant past of Scyld, to the eternal time of Christian cosmology. The significance in the futurity of a “we” who learn by asking, however, is of the utmost importance in beginning to understand the multi-valent temporalities of the collectivity in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature. In his “Discourse and the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin posits the intentionality of living discourse as a space shot-through with the multi-temporal status of utterance – a space, perhaps, not unlike the space of Beowulf. For Bakhtin, the “internal dialogism” of the word “is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.” (280) Bakhtin, of course, is speaking in direct relationship to the novel – a form foreign to Anglo-Saxon England. However, I would argue that Anglo-Saxon literature – be it prose or poetry, translation or creation – might be fruitfully thought of as constituting itself a living discourse, a space in which ideas of collectivity, time, and identity are begun, and reworked, through the period and beyond it.

The subject of my talk today – and of my dissertation, coming to a database near you in 2010 – is what I call the horizons of history. With the plethora of theoretical and critical terminology at my disposal, from fields as divergent as literary studies, historical studies, linguistics and art, one might well ask why I speak of Horizons rather than perspectives or boundaries. The answer is far from simple, but a brief explanation might serve us well as a beginning. Horizons can only be observed in the middle – i.e., the horizon is always experientially equidistant on all sides from the center point, that of the observer or subject. Any movement of the subject recenters the span of the horizon – new things come into the line of vision, others drift below the perceivable boundaries of sight. Consequently, a horizon cannot be crossed by the subject who observes it, whether they look “forward” to a future or “back” to a past. Only the object can cross over the horizon. The nature of horizons, then, is as a limiting factor in perception, defining the scope of the subject’s world-view.

The question this raises in my work is in the definition of boundaries. Boundaries must enclose something, be it a people, a place, or a time. In my argument, the boundaries in question enclose a larger, and even more contentious concept – that of “history.” For my purpose, I wish to engage the narrative strategies of history in what is traditionally called the Anglo-Saxon period. For my purposes, I define “history” – and “historiography” -- as the narrative space in which collectivities imagine and create their identities—or have these identities imagined and created for them. As such, my interest in history is the way in which historiography itself can be written in order to become that object which crosses the temporal horizons which bind its own world-view. Intersecting Bakhtin’s definitions of “living discourse,” these texts participate in a temporality that supercedes and encloses the individual times which compose the heterogeneous temporal fabric of the text. As such, the discourses of past, “present”, and the future unwritten intersect, creating a temporal space in which ideas of collectivities inhere and are passed on.

My dissertation explores a couple of different concepts of what “Anglo-Saxon” Collectivities can mean through the early Middle Ages and beyond. Unbound from periodicity in the strictest sense, the “Anglo-Saxon”, or “Old English”, becomes a constructed category, created and deployed in different historical moments for different purposes. Most specifically, the collectivities imagined in the Anglo-Saxon period are re-imagined at specific moments by communities in the process of imagining themselves, effecting what I will argue as a kind of collapsing of temporality, bringing together humans and texts that are temporally distant into a single collectivity. This “Becoming Old English” changes the ways in which the idea of a “nation” inheres in time, positing the time of the text as a time which allows for the breakdown of temporal boundaries, writing futures and pasts for a present which needs them. The time of the text is, irrevocably perhaps, always now – a contingent, relational now which participates in the past and future which permeate its horizons.

Text and Translation of Beowulf are from Chickering (1977)

Works Cited/Consulted

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Joy, Eileen and Mary K. Ramsey. "Liquid Beowulf" from The Postmodern Beowulf. Morganton: West Virginia University Press, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Also: I'm not sure how to cite this yet (though I will find out): the work posted here on ITM by Karl, Eileen and Jeffrey (along with many of the comment-ers) has had a foundational role in my thinking, as is no doubt obvious down to the very level of vocabulary. If there's a horizon that's been expanded in the work I've done toward this talk (and the prospectus which shall follow), it is most definitely the one that forms the boundaries of my own academic and intellectual capacities. For that: thank you.

Cross posted at OEinNYC.

Hollywood in the Holy Land

Posted on behalf of Nick Haydock.

Hollywood in the Holy Land: The Fearful Symmetries of Movie Medievalism
McFarland & Co., Publishers, Inc.
Co-Editors: Nick Haydock and Edward Risden

This project aims to collect essays by various hands about films concerning or evocative of confrontations between the Middle East and the West in the Middle Ages. A primary concern will of course be films set in the times of the Crusades (from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades [1935] through King Richard and the Crusaders [dir. Robert Butler 1954] and Youssef Chahine’s Saladin [1963], down to Ridley Scott’s controversial Kingdom of Heaven [2005] and H. D. Hogan’s Soldier of God [2005]), but the collection will also welcome essays on films set in medieval Spain (such as Anthony Mann’s El Cid, 1961), as well as those which explore imaginary confrontations between Vikings and Saracens (e.g. The Long Ships, dir. Jack Cardiff, 1964 and The Thirteenth Warrior, dir. John McTiernan, 1999). The legends of Robin Hood are clearly relevant here, particularly in their depictions of returns from the Levant to an enfeebled and corrupt England, including the many film versions of Sir Walter
Scott’s Ivanhoe. No less apropos are films set in contemporary times which seek to recover or escape an imagined vital connection to the medieval Middle East, such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Three Kings, Da Vinci Code, or recent low-budget films such as the Pythonesque The High Crusade or the polemical Afghan Knights. Nick Haydock will write an introduction surveying this varied corpus of films, also touching on the contemporary battles over the meaning and applicability of the Crusades to the contemporary world. Edward Risden will write a conclusion in response to the foregoing essays, mapping points of convergence and divergence among the contributions.

The Crusades (particularly as the West has conceived them) have become an embattled theater of operations for a mass-society intent on waging its wars of demagoguery over analogies between the medieval and the contemporary “clash of civilizations.” Beginning from the premise that what Erich Auerbach dubbed a figura is by definition an imagined typology linking disparate times and places based on a faith in the significance of history, recent denials of the Crusades as figura are as politically compromised as the arguments of those on all sides who stress the parallels between millennia. Though it was Pope Urban II who called the First Crusade in 1095, the contemporary occupant of the papal throne, Pope Benedict XVI, recently quoted a fourteenth century dialogue in which Islam is characterized as a religion of the sword. Official responses from the Muslim world predictably compared his “mentality” to that of the Crusades. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly cast the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a “crusade” called by George Bush. Bruce Holsinger, in study that provocatively spans both academic and political discourse, has devastatingly critiqued the linkage between neo-medievalism and neo-conservatism in what Bush in an unguarded moment called “this crusade, this war on terror.” Yet leftists like Terry Jones also run rough-shod over historical alterities to spark horrified delight at the ease with which they collapse medieval faith and modern fundamentalism. Those on the right eager to support “Operation Iraqi Freedom” are backed in their denial of the Crusades as figura by important scholars of the medieval crusading movement such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Thomas F. Madden. The work of these scholars is widely quoted in best-selling, rabble-rousing books like Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (2005). Yet conservative commentators like Spencer are seldom content merely to shun historical analogies altogether; rather they engage in a recognizably orientalist discourse whereby historical continuities are denied for the “enlightened” West but underlined for the Middle East, conceived as ideologically stable and technologically backward empires of faith.

Perhaps not surprisingly even before the release of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) experts and pundits could be heard weighing in from all sides, the very ferocity of their condemnations clearly motivated less by any dispassionate interest in popular film than by the analogies with the present the film was perceived to evoke. Riley-Smith, the reigning dean of British Crusade historians, accused Scott of sharing “Osama bin Laden’s version of history,” and UCLA’s Abou el Fadl rather petulantly forecast that Arabs would riot. In short these academic experts from their entrenched perspectives saw the film in almost mutually exclusive terms, as a condemnation of western crusades, past and present, or as a condemnation of Islam. It is neither, though of course both experts’ opinions were compromised by the fact that neither had seen the film! Yet it is worthwhile to look closely at this film and at others like it that screen popular projections of the present into the past precisely because these figurae are as ineluctable as they are toxic. Since we cannot avoid historical analogy, we must seek to understand and critique it. Riley-Smith tips his neo-con hand when he suggests that the Crusades are more analogous to the Liberation Theology movements in Spanish America than to contemporary interventions in the Persian Gulf. Yet in many of these films an ideology of “freedom” is made to translate the religious convictions of the crusaders, an appeal perhaps similarly composed of belief and cynical manipulation. That is as true of Ridley Scott’s film as it is of his major cinematic source, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades (1935), which likewise preached non-involvement to Americans in the face of an international menace. Scott also imagines the late 12th century Jerusalem as a convivencia of Muslim and Christian, not unlike that portrayed in El Cid and appealed to by both academics and in popular culture as a model of multi-cultural tolerance. Indeed, in the imagined friendship between the Arab Imad and the Frankish Balian, Scott’s film proposes a recurrent trope of interfaith and intercultural tolerance which finds its ultimate source in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman but appears too in films as varied as El Cid and The Thirteenth Warrior. In short, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven demonstrates that the politics of these films are likely to be as ambivalent as the culture that produces them.

This collection of essays will be the first to take as its subject films that might broadly be characterized as products both of medievalism and orientalism. In studying these films we hope to allow our readers to consider both constants and divergences in a cinematic technology of othering both the past and East while bringing both into fearful symmetries (or telling asymmetries) with the modern western world.

Submissions:
Contributors are asked to submit electronic copies of their work to Nick Haydock (NickHaydock@excite.com) and Edward Risden (edward.risden.snc.edu) by April 1, 2008. Submissions should follow McFarland house style (which we will provide) and be from 5000-10,000 words, including footnotes and works cited.

Tis The Season, Part II

In honor of both procrastination and Eileen's Tim Spence and portable digital music players post below, I decided to try my hand--a hand, I should say, that right now has nothing to do with the Middle Ages--at a music mix using this new Boomshuffle service. The available selection's about what one would expect for this stage in their product, so I did what I could. If anyone's using dialup or other slow connections, and this embedded object is killing your ability to read the substantive posts, let me know, and I'll take this down.

Nationalism and stereotypes. Also, peeing in teacups.

Readers of ITM likely know the litany of nationalist stereotypes that were repeated throughout the Middle Ages. G. G. Coulton laid them out well in "Nationalism in the Middle Ages" Cambridge Historical Journal 5 (1935-37): 15-40. In my own work, I've looked at a moment when William of Malmesbury attempts to convey a crusade-inspired Christianitas that transcends national difference ... but does so in unselfconsciously nationalistic terms. During the First Crusade, he writes, Christians everywhere joined the cause, even those dwelling "on remotest islands and among barbarian nations." He describes these "distant" races according to what each must abandon in order to join the cause: "The time had come for the Welshman to give up hunting in his forests, the Scotsman forsook his familiar fleas, the Dane his constant drinking, and the Norwegian left his diet of raw fish" (History of the Kings of England 4.348) -- a litany of stereotypes that undercuts the imagined unity.

A recent advert for Eurostar service between London and Brussels also demonstrates how hard it is to stop thinking outside nation-enveloping caricature ... for both parties involved. Here the Manneken Pis becomes a soccer hooligan / skinhead peeing in a teacup.

(full story, NYT [which adds to the jumbo generalizations with many of its own] or Guardian blogs, for some vox populi)

'Tis the Season to Indulge in the Tim Spence Experiment

Figure 1. Still Life with Rob Shortridge behind the bar at Erato and Eileen Joy's rioja, or is that a barbera, or a zinfandel? . . . oh, forget it

It has often been said [well, I say it] that, if Erato Wine Bar on Grand Avenue in Saint Louis is BABEL's official editorial office, and In The Middle is its "floating residence" [we actually say this very thing in the Acknowledgments of Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, which is now officially in print! congratulations to us or something like that], then Seal Beach, California is its secret headquarters, where BABEL's mixmaster and surfer girlfriend, Betsy McCormick, is in residence. Ever since Tim Spence delivered his paper at this year's Kalamazoo meeting, "The Book of Hours and iPods, Passionate Lyrics and Prayers: Technologies of the Devotional Self," Betsy decided to see if what Tim wrote was true:

Imagine a laboratory. Turn on the lights. In their soft, electronic glow you see two technologies sitting on individual lab tables. On one table is a Book of Hours, a portal within the manuscript technologies used by cultures of devotion to perpetuate a life of emotionally-driven meaning. On the other table is an iPod, a portal within the digital technologies used by cultures of devotion to perpetuate a life of emotionally-driven meaning. . . . The iPod and the medieval Book of Hours are two seemingly alien technologies that have surprisingly similar effects on the people who use them. In essence, I believe that today’s iPods are yesterday’s Books of Hours. I think we can learn quite a bit about the culture of devotion that produced a boom in the production of prayer manuals in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries by thinking of these manuscripts as akin to the iPod and mp3 players in today’s popular culture. These devices help to individualize us, while at the same time habituating our emotions to function within a larger corporate structure.

. . . .

The mystic and rock and roller stand as bookends opposed to modernity. Both icons extend far beyond Mr. Cogito’s reason, the logos of the printed Word. Richard Rolle embodies—and tries to instruct others how to embody—a constant state of sweetness in the form of a song. Rolle’s notion of embodiment has much more in common with Hedwig’s angry inch than either do with Grey’s Anatomy. The mystic rocker embodies a habitus of devotion based on complex imagery. The images of these cultures of devotion focus on a limited number of themes, including personal suffering, particularly in love and fighting. Unlike a habitus based on scientific reason, the mystic rocker embraces emotions as a viable medium for cultural memory and social communication. By habituation, the mystic rocker orders its lives in a spiritual manner, using emotions as vehicles through which individuals might experience a particular physical sensation—oftentimes describable as “bittersweet”—whenever s/he wants. In 1407 the most popular vehicle, or media, for an intimate and immediate invocation of this pleasure/pain through spiritual devotion was the Book of Hours; in 2007 it is the iPod.

As an act of devotion, if we can call it that, to Tim's thinking here, Betsy has crafted the Seal Beach 2007 iPod mix, which we offer here to ITM readers as BABEL's holiday gift. Please don't tell us which songs you hate or note the songs that we somehow overlooked or disparage our dj talents. This is our mix, and we think it's perfect. We like to think it comes on strong, like adrenaline, and leaves softly, carrying a wobbly martini. Habituate yourself to the summer [2007] of BABEL. Or resist entirely. It's up to you. We would like to say that if you send an email to Eileen [at ejoy@siue.edu] we'll mail you a CD version, but then we'd be breaking the laws of the corporate "man." But still. We're just sayin'. It's a free country. You can send that email. If you feel like it. Happy holidays.

The Tim Spence Experiment: Seal Beach 2007

This is the Sea [The Waterboys]
Gimme Shelter [The Rolling Stones]
Connected [Stereo MCs]
Umbrella [Rhianna, featuring Jay-Z]
Don't Change [INXS]
Come Undone [Duran Duran]
Extreme Ways [Moby]
Bad [U2]
What Goes Around . . ./. . . Comes Around [Justin Timberlake]
Ship of Fools [World Party and Anthony Thistlewaite]
Older [Colbie Caillat]
Theme from Endless Summer
Big Girls Don't Cry [Fergie]
Eminence Front [The Who]
Best I Ever Had [Gary Allan]
Here's to Life [Shirley Horn]

The Disavowed Pleasures of Gowther

It's the end of the semester: classes to conclude! meetings to attend! papers to grade! exams to compose! deadlines to miss! All of us academics are nearing exhaustion.

Agreed! Agreed! And articles to proof! And write! And grants to write! But lord knows it's not as bad as adjuncting. Lord knows it's not bad at all.

Yesterday one of my students observed that "everyone thinks everyone in the Middle Ages was dirty and stupid, but you make it seem like they were just like us." My response: "Yeah...stupid." Thankfully she got the (perhaps ill-advised) joke, and I hope she gets what drove it: another attempt to drive out any sense of temporal superiority or, for that matter, nostalgia.

Strangely enough, her comment came after a class on Sir Gowther, in which I went after the familiar strange mixture of titillation and sanctimoniousness in its opening stanzas. It starts:

God, that art of myghtis most,
Fader and Sone and Holy Gost,
That bought man on Rode so dere,
Shilde us from the fowle fende,
That is about mannys sowle to shende
All tymes of the yere!

More below!

I observed that the lines looks like any of the usual invocations for a Middle English narrative (cf The Avowyng of Arthur and Emaré), but they're not in fact, at least not yet, calling down a blessing on its audience. Rather they throw up a barrier against demonic forces, whose ability to "shende" the human soul is in fact a direct result of the infernal thoughts this very poem inspires. See Neil Cartlidge, at 136, which observes that the opening stanzas problematize

the whole business of tale-telling by implicitly raising the question of discursive responsibility: for if it is accepted that describing the Devil's activities in any sense invites them [a point Cartlidge had already established], then the author's decision to tell the story of Sir Gowther has to be morally questionable.

Not only morally questionable, then, but also an invitation to bodily injury or erotic sin: for the primary demonic threat in Gowther is not to the soul: "Sumtyme the fende hadde postee / For to dele with ladies free" or, as it explains later on, demons "sarvyd never of odyr thyng / But for to tempe wemen yon." By casting its protective net over the readers, the prayer implicitly interpellates them, and its orator, the collective "us," as women-about-to-have-sex-with-(or -be-raped-by-) demons. This is, after all, what demons do, at least within the confines of this poem.

The flirtation of these newly hailed women with--or their perilous proximity to (so much depends on how we understand the demonic sex!)--infernal forces occurs simply because of the telling, and the desire for, this poem, which, according to the poem's own self-promotion, is a "ferly" or "selcowgh" thing to hear. What have we, the listeners, gotten ourselves into? Something--what, I don't quite know yet--much more than the "schame" from which the narrative voice hopes to be shielded. Something terrifying, wonderful, strange, uncanny, monstrous, something in which cupidity and fear and disavowed desire, surely the seed of shame, are inextricably intermingled.

In the most straightforward reading, that shame ("As Cryst fro schame me schyld") is the shame of relating the particular details of how demons, despite lacking bodies of their own, impregnate women. The shame here may also be the shame of lacking a proper explanation for the events of the poem: according to a scholarly consensus (see Aquinas (reply obj 6), who agrees with Augustine), demons do not impregnate women themselves, but rather artificially inseminate women with stolen semen, and thus "the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man." Because the demonchild Gowther, in other words, should not actually be a demonchild, the shame here is in part the shame of getting the doctrine wrong and then cheekily ascribing the (willfully mistaken!) notion to the misunderstood scholars ("Therof seyus clerkus, y wotte how"). Mostly, however, I think the shame is the shame of wanting to hear this story, despite or indeed because of its dangers, a story of women suffering macerated breasts, friars thrown off cliffs, parsons hung on hooks, nuns (at least in one of the manuscripts) raped and burned to death in their own convent, a story, that is, crowded with the grand guignol of hagiography.

Jesu Cryst, that barne blythe,
Gyff hom joy, that lovus to lythe
Of ferlys that befell.

And that's the beginning of the introduction's final stanza. Give us joy indeed, and give us, but not too much, protection from the shame of our own joy. Although Robert Mills' Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture is only on my shelf, not yet read, I felt certain enough to wind things up by linking the desire for Gowther and the hagiographic pendulation between imitatio and admiratio with the purportedly pious obsession in hagiography with mutilated erogenous zones: faces, breasts, skin, genitals, the beautiful naked bodies of men and women, boys and girls, virgins mostly, made to live out, and die for, fantasies badly veiled by sanctimoniousness.

It's this reading that led to the student remarking on the medievals being just like us. Of course I've just committed a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to believe that my student, and by extension all my students, found themselves implicated, caught up, in Gowther's pious titillation of torture.

Gowther Recommended Bibliography

Blamires, Alcuin, "The twin demons of aristocratic society in Sir Gowther" Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance. Ed. Nicola McDonald. Manchester UP. (2004), 45-62

Cartlidge, Neil. "'Therof Seyus Clerkus': Slander, Rape and Sir Gowther", in Corinne Saunders, ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England. D. S. Brewer, 2005, 135-47

(our own) Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, "The Body Hybrid: Giants, Dog-Men, and Becoming Inhuman," in Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Minnesota UP, 1999, 119-141.

Gilbert, Jane, "Unnatural mothers and monstrous children in The King of Tars and Sir Gowther." Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy. Ed. Jocelyn Wogan Browne, et al. Brepols, 2000, 329-344

McGregor, Francine, "The Paternal Function in Sir Gowther." Essays in Medieval Studies 16 (1999):67-78

Saunders, Corinne J., "Symtyme the fende". Questions of rape in Sir Gowther." Studies in English Language and Literature: "Doubt wisely". Papers in honour of E.G. Stanley. Ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler. Routledge, 1996, 286-303

Uebel, Michael. "The Foreigner Within: The Subject of Abjection in Sir Gowther." Meeting the Foreigner in the Middle Ages. Ed. Albrecht Classen. Routledge, 2002, 96-118.

Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages

An interesting conference at the University of Edinburgh, January 11-13. Keynote speakers are Juliette Dor, Steven Kruger, Sara Lipton and Carol Braun Pasternack. Programme here; abstracts here; main conference website here. If any reader of ITM is attending and would like to guest blog the event, please let us know.

Laptop Loss: The Aftermath.

In the not too distant past, my laptop was stolen. Our student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, re-enacted the scene of my discovering the theft thus:

When Jeffrey Cohen, the chair of the English department, returned to his office after making some photocopies, what he found astonished him. His desk was arranged as usual, but there was a gaping hole where his laptop computer had been 30 minutes earlier. Also its chain lock cable was slashed.

In the interest of accuracy, I must stress that no hole was in fact gaping. The fabric of the cosmos had not torn, and my laptop had not been sucked into the primal void. There was simply an empty space on my table where my MacBook Pro had been accustomed to reside.

At this time of academic insanity, when those of us who are graduate students are composing three seminar papers simultaneously and those of us who are further along in the profession are frantically struggling against deadline convergence (I myself have two articles, two reader's reports, an abstract and a book review due in the next two weeks) -- and most of us are grading exams and papers and attempting to assist our students in keeping it all together -- well, at this time when we are all generating quite a bit of data, I offer the following two suggestions for safeguarding the fruits (whether they be bananas or kumquats) of your scholarly labor:

1. Get a program that automatically backs up your computer to a hard drive at least once a day, every day. Since I have a Mac, I upgraded to OS X.5, which includes a nifty program called Time Machine. The entire laptop backs up every hour at both work and home (I keep two external hard drives) ... and retains an earlier version of everything, should I ever want to return to a document after I've revised the vitality out of it.
2. Since a backup that resides on a hard drive that you keep near your computer isn't much of a backup, pay the $4.95 monthly charge and sign up for Mozy. Over several days, their software program will back up the entire contents of your computer to Mozy's servers, where it is kept encrypted and secure. You can access your files anywhere, and after the initial backup (which takes forever) only new items are sent to the remote server.

Good luck as your semester comes to an end.

A song that should have been on the Beowulf movie soundtrack

The song? Grendel's Mother by the Mountain Goats. Permanently residing in the soundtrack that plays all day in my head courtesy of the evil genius who composes the Chaucer blog. Angelina Jolie, eat your heart out. Or rip out and devour the heart of Hondscio, or whatever disposable member of Beowulf's retinue you please.

The Caribbean Medieval

Island Love
[photo at left of the Palm at the End of the Mind by author]

I've been in love with the Caribbean since visiting Saint Lucia in 1990. In the years that followed I've been to Cozumel, Key West, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, Grand Cayman, the Bahamas -- as well as Bermuda (an island that floats in the Atlantic, but similar in many ways to those farther south). Perhaps there is just something about islands that draws me: I proposed to my wife atop the crumbling fortress on George's Island, in Boston Harbor; the first extensive trip we took together, a year into our marriage, was to Kauai and Oahu (that was as far as our frequent flier points would carry us); and of course I give over much of my life to thinking about Britain. As Mary Kate is frequently arguing here at ITM, place suffuses meditation, often in surprising ways.

It's the end of the semester: classes to conclude! meetings to attend! papers to grade! exams to compose! deadlines to miss! All of us academics are nearing exhaustion. I invite you, dear readers, to mix yourself a rum drink, turn the heat way up and switch on a fan, find some internet radio station that streams steel drums all day -- or skip all the fantasies of island life and read this piece on George Odlum, or this great book by Richard Price -- and then skim the following, some excerpts from previously published work that suggests how the Caribbean might transform the medieval. [For some insight on how the medieval did in fact transform the Caribbean, on the other hand, you can't do better than Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell: read his book, or read his talk at GW].

I opened The Postcolonial Middle Ages with this quotation from Antonio Benítez-Rojo: "Where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar..." (The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed., trans. James E. Maraniss). Benítez-Rojo describes the Caribbean as a "meta-archipelago," a figuration I found especially useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as "the Middle Ages" even while insisting on the violence generalization performs. In Medieval Identity Machines, I finished the thought, so to speak, offering this account of how Antonio Benítez-Rojo's model might provide a useful figuration for time as well as space.

----------------------
Islands and Middles

How does one encounter the past as an anteriority that continually introduces an otherness or alterity into the present?
-- Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Unlike Hamlet's description of unknown futures, time is probably less an "undiscover'd country" than a postcolonial expanse. Medieval studies has long known that its lands, peoples, texts are nearly always indelibly marked by long histories of colonization, resistance, assimilation, coexistence. This section explores some recent scholarship on another hybrid geography, the Caribbean, to suggest the ways in which a particularly deleuzian strain of thought in postcolonial theory might be useful to medievalists interested in rethinking the relations among space, time and cultural admixture in their discipline, as well as to theorists of the contemporary postcolonial who might want to account with greater temporal depth for the complexities of colonialism's histories.

A vastness of islands scattered over a confluence of troubled seas, the Caribbean is difficult to totalize. Produced over centuries through multiple colonizations (five European tongues have mingled with numerous aboriginal and African languages, catalyzing hundreds of dialects, creoles, pidgins), Caribbean space is diverse, a place of category-defying syncretism, symbiosis, fusion. Collective designation, moreover, runs the risk of simply repeating the colonialist demand that the heterogeneity of the islands be reduced into some neatly describable territory in order to better dominate its supposed disorder with Western technologies of government and industry. In his attempt to articulate the "discontinuous conjunction" of this wide expanse, Antonio Benítez-Rojo deploys a conceptual construct which he labels la isla que se repite, the "repeating island" or "meta-archipelago." Because a chain of islands consists of a territorial harmony, a geographic unity plotted across the still space of a map, Benítez-Rojo insists that such a domineering view can never capture the fullness of Caribbean reality. Possessed of neither center nor absolute limits, indifferent to any precision of green spots fixed with individuating latitudes and longitudes in an ocean of blue, the meta-archipelago which he describes is not a collection of islands but an amalgam of "processes, dynamics and rhythms" conjoining familiar repetitions of history to unexpected eruptions of the new. The Caribbean meta-archipelago does not enchain but gathers into loose alliance a heterogeneous mixture of phenomena not amenable to easy synthesis: "unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification" (The Repeating Island, 2-3). This sensuous mélange assembles into animated conjunction the geographic, the topological, the natural, the human, the mythic, the material, covering "the map of world history's contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures that humankind has seen" (5). Lands, waters and histories exist in a dispersed togetherness that never congeals into finite unity. In an essay which Benítez-Rojo does not cite, Gilles Deleuze similarly envisions a conceptual archipelago which could also be described as anti-universalist, conjugative, perspectivist, "an affirmation of a world in process":

Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has its value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines … an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings.

Within remarkably similar poetics of fluidity and movement, Deleuze and Benítez-Rojo independently transform the quotidian archipelago into an aqueous assemblage which has less to do with actual islands than with a multiply connected meshwork of scattered "middles" which might decenter the world, but does not necessitate the abandonment of speaking about that world's shared immensity. The meta-archipelago, Benítez-Rojo writes in summary, is a restless machine of uncertain borders composed of unceasing flux (5).

Postcolonial theory directed toward the study of the Americas has a tendency to describe western Europe as a community of nations with a shared set of values, especially in the outward thrust of their imperial zeal. Even within national boundaries, European countries are imagined to be homogeneous: the French, the English, the Spanish and so on are supposed to have discrete identities intimately tied to the stable and apparently natural boundaries of their homelands. Europe is thus composed of coherent corporate entities with a tendency to act uniformly, even when in competition with each other. In describing the exploitation machine erected by Columbus as a kind of "medieval vacuum cleaner" which sucked resources from the New World for deposit on distant shores, Benítez-Rojo can therefore assume that Europe acted as a singular agent in perfecting a structure which was initially rather inept, augmenting its Columbian bricolage with la flota (the machine formed of ships, ports, and flows of raw material and wealth), missionaries deployed to effect religious transformation, plantations with their adaptable structures for quick implementation and lasting domination, "an entire huge assemblage of machines" (8) whose conjunction enabled efficient colonization and maximum profit.

Medievalists who study the European west are unlikely, however, to recognize the singular geographical actor at the receiving end of this impressive apparatus. Strangely enough, it is the culture of the meta-archipelago and the dynamic Caribbean machine which reverberate as possible figurations for the psychical and cultural complexity of the occidental Middle Ages. Recent work in medieval studies has undercut the possibility of assuming a transhistorical, corporate identity for Europe, arguing that the term organizes into an imaginary totality communities which did not necessarily perceive themselves as part of any such grand collective.

Linguistically and culturally diverse, connected by shifting alliance and multiple affiliation, medieval Europa was a machine animated as much by conquest, alliance and shared history (consolidating or integrative movements) as violent counterstruggle and ultimate inassimilability (eruption, assertion, sedimentation of difference). Benítez-Rojo is writing of a specific time and place in their relation to constitutive histories and topographies, of a geotemporality of which the Middle Ages knew nothing and which -- "medieval vacuum cleaners" aside -- had in turn little knowledge of the European medium aevum.

Yet his "polyrhythmic" conceptual figurations are useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as the western Middle Ages even while insisting upon the inherent inadequacy and potential violence which all such generalization performs. What if like the Caribbean space described by Benítez-Rojo the western Middle Ages consist of islands of difference made contiguous through the shared embrace of turbulent, confluential seas? Bede, after all, described the flow of time (lapsus temporum) as both "churning" (volubilis) and "wave-tossed" (fluctivagus). Why not extend Bede's oceanic metaphors to include the possibility of more solid spaces within the temporal flux? Some of these islands might, like the barren outcroppings sought by early Irish eremites, stand in relative isolation. Most, however, would be more like monkish Iona. The loneliness of this island in the outer Hebrides dissipates the moment we recall that Saint Columba assembled there a polyglot community drawn from many nations; that the monastery which he founded was visited with some regularity by merchants from Gaul; that flows of books and boats and pilgrims traversed its shores; that little Iona's history is inseparable from epic battles waged in Ireland and Scotland, from the consolidation of a Christian Northumbria by Oswald, from the missionary effort to convert those Pictish kingdoms now lost to history.

Adomnán, Columba's eventual successor and composer of his vita, even entertained at the monastery a storm-tossed pilgrim returning from the Holy Land. The Life of Saint Columba is a weirdly heterogeneous text, as likely to narrate a relentlessly local anecdote about a demon dwelling in the bottom of a milk pail or the saint's predicting an imminent spilled inkpot as to provide a sweeping evocation of how this "island at the edge of the ocean" disseminates miracles known beyond "the three corners of Spain and Gaul and Italy beyond the Alps." Iona in the Life is not ultimately much of an island. Even when Columba resides on its rocky shores his spirit wanders, participating in distant martial clashes, communing with angelic visitors, scattering his selfhood across the wide world. The Life of Saint Columba textually performs this sacred fluidity, resolutely refusing linear chronology or recognizable biography. Names and events recur irregularly; sometimes Columba is dead and sometimes he is alive; the action often unfolds in Iona, but sometimes we are in Ireland, or among the Picts, or watching the Loch Ness monster attack. We are constantly transported across marine expanses without transitional signals, taken back to Iona without warning, in movements that draw together distant geotemporalities without synthesizing them into a homogeneous whole.

The western Middle Ages as expanse of diverse conceptual isles means existence in intimate, unexpected connection through the swirl of manifold currents, through swiftly changing movements which rapidly commix flows of peoples, goods, ideas, armies, languages, architectures, books, genes, religions, affects, animals, technologies. Scatterings of lands gathered in their mutual relations, gathered with the currents that animate but do not totalize them, a medieval meta-archipelago would lack fixed boundaries and contain multiple centers. European cultures, communities, nations become relational and provisional imaginings rather than ontological, self-possessed wholes. Think, for example, of Custance in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, inscribing a colonial trajectory at once provincially English and transnationally Christian upon a world that includes Syria, Rome, Northumberland.

A meta-archipelago requires that this cosmos be seen not only through that imperial gaze which frames the narrative, but also through the eyes of the Sultaness, the Northumbrians, Custance herself as a woman caught in a gendered game of cultural, religious, mercantile, bodily exchange. David Nirenberg has demonstrated that violence not only established medieval communities of diversity, but was integral to sustaining them (Communities of Violence). As the Man of Law's Tale also indicates, violence plays an important role in the instigation and maintenance of the flows that forcibly bind one conceptual island in the medieval archipelago to another.

Yet, in a kind of decolonization, the meta-archipelago enables the supposed margins of Europe to lose their status as peripheral geographies, so that Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Iceland, the Midi, Catalonia become centers in their own right, dynamic points of reception and dispersal in an open meshwork of transverse, transformative differences. No circumscribing map could capture the proliferating fullness of such islands, for every time the borders of a homogenous Britannia seem to have been securely delineated, another story begins to circulate of some interior, underground civilization where the people speak a long dead language, have green skin, or give other marks of their fairy alterity, of their inassimilable difference to an island that will never achieve its ambition of becoming a well ordered self-same.

These "figures of secret and unknown origin" (as Gervase of Tilbury called them) inhabited the interiors of mountains and ruled submarinal demesnes. Even the skies were populated by alien navigators of inscrutable intent. In the Otia imperiala, Gervase describes how a congregation leaving church beholds an anchor falling from the sky. In the distant clouds sailors can be heard struggling to pull the device back aboard their ship. Soon one of these mariners shimmies down the rope, hand over hand. He is immediately seized by the crowd, struggles for his life, and drowns because the "moistness of our denser air" is intolerable to his ether-adapted lungs. When "our" previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else's sea, then "our" skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways. In mentioning such fantastic peoples living below the earth, under the waters, and in the clouds along with the real denizens of places like Wales and Ireland -- people who were themselves sometimes represented in just such "magical" and dehumanizing ways in order to exaggerate the challenge which they posed to English hegemony -- my intention is not to take any measure of concrete, lived reality away from any denizen of the medieval archipelago but rather, in sympathy with a medieval impulse, to populate its land, seas, and air with as much life as possible, to restore to this world its vastness, its vitalism, its irreducible heterogeneity.

As David Wallace observes in his General Preface to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, the Middle Ages have been badly treated by scholars who desired find in them a "future that comes to early" -- who wanted to discover the same delineations of nation and imperial power which they unproblematically celebrate in their own present. Wallace's succinct, insightful reading of The Cambridge History of the British Empire (first volume published 1929) and Cambridge History of English Literature (first volume 1907) emphasizes the awkwardness which such teleological rhetoric engenders. Because medieval England with its "plurality of languages" was "a culture more colonized than colonizing," no "secure point of origin for imperial history" exists, mandating that the Middle Ages be commemorated in order to be quickly forgotten (xii-xiii). In contrast, Wallace's own edited volume ambitiously aims for and largely achieves a "dizzying complexity" of cultures, languages, and material realities (xiv). In envisioning a British Isles resistant to harmonization rather than a unified and premature England, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature attains something like the archipelago-like spread articulated by Benítez-Rojo. In the dazzling series of chapters labeled "Writing in the British Isles" (179-309), sections on Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are allowed to "write their histories, so to speak, from the inside out (with the English sometimes visible, sometimes not)" (179). In decentering the island into a scattered multiplicity, the volume's project is admirable, even awesome.

It therefore feels almost criminal to critique its achievement, especially because Wallace's editorial restructuring of how insular history gets narrated will be felt in the field for a long time, catalyzing further decolonizations of the "English" Middle Ages. Yet one might object that within the large geographic and collective structures which the volume keeps in place, communities of difference (what Anne McClintock calls the "internally colonized") are left out, are rendered ineligible to write their histories. The preface to this bulky and inclusive book argues that the chapter on London in the "Writing in the British Isles" section "must stand in, methodologically, for accounts of other places that have yet to be written, cannot yet be written, or have found no space for inclusion here." Among these excluded narratives are "the writings and public inscriptions of the Jews" (xvi). One cannot say that such a Jewish account cannot be written; see, for example, the documentary narration of exactly this history in Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, published in 1893. That such an account has simply "found no space for inclusion here" is not a reassuring explanation for why a volume notable for its capacious embrace of cultural difference nonetheless presents an unselfconsciously Christian -- and therefore an ultimately singular and reduced -- Middle Ages.

A reconsideration of geographical emplacement is as vital to the future of the Middle Ages as it is to the analysis of Caribbean and other postcolonial spaces. Just as importantly, as Wallace has already implied, within these places of shared histories conjoined to disparate experience and expression, time likewise loses its smooth universality, its exteriority, its rigidity. While contemporary critical theory has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for dealing with that which is unheimlich ("uncanny" "un-home-ly" "out of place"), a problem just now being explored is that posed by the untimely. Without much further elaboration, Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes that inside the fluid and sinuous Caribbean machine, time "unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar" (11). Benítez-Rojo's throwaway observation can be usefully extended using recent work by other postcolonial theorists. The Caribbean, the medieval west, English India, and any other geography produced through colonizations are likewise composed of multiple, hybridized temporalities, of what Sara Suleri has called disparate, thick, "colonial intimacies" in which time unfolds differently at different vantage points, according to divergent "logics of origin."

The adjective "postcolonial" has been accommodated comfortably enough into the contemporary critical lexicon for the hyphen that used to divide its constituent parts to vanish. This disappearing punctuation, like all ghosts, tells an interesting story about time. "Post-colonial" suggests straightforwardly enough that a historical period exists which is after colonialism. "Postcolonial," the hyphen digested but its constituent elements bumping against each other without synthesis, has come to signify a temporal contiguity to rather than an evolutionary difference from the noun that forms its linguistic base. The postcolonial can be said to originate "from the very first moment of colonial contact," as a "discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being." Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge describe the postcolonial as "a splinter in the side of the colonial itself," leading Michelle R. Warren to conclude that postcolonial theory opens a window "into any time or place where one social group dominates an other." Just as there was never a time before colony, there has never yet been a time when the colonial has been outgrown, left behind. For this reason Gayatri Spivak has suggested replacing "postcolonial" with "neocolonial," but for accuracy's sake it would make more sense to speak of the "midcolonial": the time of "always-already," an intermediacy that no narrative can pin to a single moment of history in its origin or end.

Anne McClintock has cautioned that the term "postcolonial" is nonetheless haunted by a "commitment to linear time and the idea of 'development'" ("The Angel of Progress" 85). One could go farther and argue that postcolonial theory in practice has neglected the study of the "distant" past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen. This exclusionary model of temporality denies the possibility that traumas, exclusions, violence enacted centuries ago might still linger in contemporary identity formations. It also closes off the possibility that this past could be multiple and valuable enough to contain (and be contained within) alternative presents and futures.

No definition of postcolonial theory has gained the same citational weight as that by Homi Bhabha: "Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order." Postcolonial interventions into the "discourses of modernity" fragment the clean and easy identity narratives which cultures tell themselves, offering "critical revisions" which stress difference, conflict, and (to cite Bhabha citing Habermas) "widely scattered historical contingencies" (171). "Bearing witness" would seem to be an activity one does in the present in order to address a recent past -- thus the haunting of Bhabha's definition by the modern. Yet there is nothing especially recent about the "differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races," social antagonism, and irreducible difference he describes. Indeed, the temporal boundaries that Bhabha draws seem especially arbitrary in that an important challenge offered by this essay and by his work in general is a rethinking of temporality itself from a postcolonial perspective.

The progress narratives of that traditional history which has left its traces in the names assigned to the major epochs of the West declare that the Middle Ages began in darkness and ended at a rebirth which rendered them obsolete. As the possible alliance between the contemporary Caribbean, English India, and the medieval West suggests, however, a progressive or teleological history in which time is conceived as mere seriality and flat chronology is inadequate to the task of thinking the meanings and trauma of the past, its embeddedness in place, its active relation to the future. Once homogeneity and hierarchizing, developmental, or overarching models are denied history, time becomes an active component within the open structure of alliance which both Benítez-Rojo and Deleuze call a machine, an assemblage "of diverse elements … which generates new structures without homogenizing the components … the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say."

An advantage, moreover, of conceptualizing temporality as multiply centered movements among unstable isles rather than as a unidirectional river is that distance in space no longer implies distance in time. Too often that which is geographically far from some ideological center is represented as primitive, undeveloped, Other, so that travel toward the periphery is coded as travel back in time. Because it possesses no margins per se, the medieval archipelago resists such easy conflation. Dublin and St David's c. 1300 are no more nor less backward than London c. 1300 or Washington DC c. 2001. Creation of a nonspatialized, shared, coeval time allows the possibility of what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls "the radical contemporaneity of mankind," the opening up of a world without temporalized violence against that which is different and distant. In arguing that temporalities separated by centuries may also in a sense be coeval, I am taking Fabian's argument further than he intended, since for him coevalness applies to cultures contemporary to each other but geographically removed.

Once progressivist narratives of chronology have been abandoned, can movement in time ever be "back," with all the negative connotations which anterior temporality (as undeveloped, as primitive) carries? The possibility of coevalness across time, it must be noted, does not imply a radical moral relativism, but simply carries an insistence that "advanced" civilizations cannot claim an innate ethical superiority over those at their temporal or geographical margins. Coevalness requires as well an acknowledgement that the achievement of a tolerant or non-persecuting society is at best a fragile and temporary gain rather than the irreversible attainment of some higher stage of societal evolution, some permanent state of enlightenment. A constant vigilance is by implication absolutely necessary to maintain these moments as tenuous as they are rare.

The Middle Ages have been too often characterized as a field of undifferentiated otherness against which modernity emerged, an exclusionary model of temporalization at least as old as the construction of the "Renaissance" as an epoch of classical rebirth. By establishing a continuity between the pre- and post-medieval, this periodization precipitated the Middle Ages as middle while at the same time banishing them from any kind of center. The medieval thus constructed becomes, in Louise O. A. Fradenburg's words, unchanging, inert, "lost to us by its very pastness." Alterity removes the Middle Ages from temporality altogether, rendering it inviolate. Conceptualizing this same temporal expanse as a middle space of scattered islands collected via ceaseless currents produces a rather unmedieval Middle Ages. The medieval as meta-archipelago -- as interminable, difficult middle -- stresses not simple difference (the past as past) or predictable similarity (the past as present) but temporal interlacement, the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity (the past which opens up the present to a multitude of futures).

This resolutely medium aevum therefore lacks both a Genesis-like in principio at which to locate a destiny-laden foundation and a Day of Judgment to organize manifold circulations into a linear temporal movement. If this Borromean knot which entwines disparate temporalities, supplanting the teleological chronology of more traditional history, seems uncannily similar to the theoretical displacement of linear history within postcolonial studies, that is no coincidence, since the "middle" of the Middle Ages is already forging a productive alliance with the nontemporal "post" of postcolonial theory. It makes sense, then, to explore the complex ways in which the medieval touches the "midcolonial," making both more familiar and more strange. The past need not function as a field of simple origin, as a time of mythic wholeness which underwrites contemporary fantasies of ethnic, national, or even epistemological homogeneity. Janus-faced, biformis, the Middle Ages performs a double work, so that the alliance of postcolonial theory and medieval studies might open up the present to multiplicity, newness, difficult similarity conjoined to complex difference.

A conceptualization of time as unbounded middle is not simply the recent invention of critical temporal studies and postcolonial theory, but is evident even in medieval authors, including one of the most canonical writers, Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales are best known for a temporal opposition between the still and confident eternity of which the indestructible bodies of saints partake (incorruptable Cecilia in the Second Nun's Tale, the murdered but uncannily animate "litel clergeon" of the Prioress) and the hurried measurement of days and hours which obsess Harry Bailey and the Canon's Yeoman ("capital time," a figuration of temporality which has much in common with the transmutational fixations of alchemy and humoral theory). Yet this same collection of heterogeneous narratives also produces a meta-archipelago of its own. Like Salvation History itself, The Canterbury Tales are possessed of a beginning (the General Prologue, the departure from Southwark, the instigations of Fragment I) and a definitive end (the approach at sunset into Canterbury, the Parson's sober recitation, the contrite Retraction), but this unfinished assemblage is actually all middle. The Tales combine politics, religion, art, commerce, social critique into an unsynthesized amalgam of romance, hagiography, history, fabliaux, fantasy, sermons, exemplary narratives, poetry, prose. They produce a motley assortment of persons who often overstep the boundaries of their textuality and begin to act as if alive.

Deleuze and Guattari label such works transversal or rhizomatic, lacking an exterior unity and composed not of a "system of units" but of "directions in motion." As nonhierarchical and acentered as a meta-archipelago, rhizomatic books do not argue a point or mirror a world, but create an assemblage which "operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots" (A Thousand Plateaus 21). Chaucer appears to have finished the concluding section of his opus fairly early in the project, and so we know, therefore, that the Canterbury Tales were supposed to culminate at the tomb of the "holy, blissful martyr" Thomas à Becket, where in the sacred space of a cathedral the quotidian pilgrimage is transubstantiated into the soul's journey to celestial eternity. Yet, having written that orthodox ending in the face of which there would seem to be nothing more to say, Chaucer sabotaged at every point the possibility of everlasting resolution.

Not only did he continually rework the General Prologue, energizing its wide-ranging fellowship by adding an inspired assortment of new characters (including himself), he also seems to have been constantly revising the overall plan for the tale-telling. Derek Pearsall has argued that Chaucer's original plan was for each pilgrim to provide one story on the way to Canterbury. Chaucer later modified the tale-telling frame to allow two or more narratives by each figure before arrival at the final destination, then at a later date opened up the possibility of multiple tales by each pilgrim on the journey to the cathedral as well as during the return trip to London. It is perhaps shocking enough to think that the Canterbury which the Parson transfigures into Jerusalem Celestial allows a return. Yet Chaucer also decided to introduce the possibility of expansion for the company via chance encounters along the road, such as the alchemist and yeoman who explosively overtake the narrative, rendering the Canterbury company less pilgrims defined by their destination than simple compagnons de route, fellow travelers.

The Canterbury Tales project could not be finished by Chaucer because it aspires to no totality. Bernard of Clairvaux described the body as the tabernaculum (tent) "in which we wander as pilgrims," a vivid image which Bruce Holsinger glosses as a body which "is not a permanent home or native residence, but … an ever-present but mobile reminder of humanity's displacement from the true Holy Land above" ("The Color of Salvation" 172-73). Chaucer likewise intricated pilgrimage with bodies, but without reading the peregrinations of these pilgrim corpora back from what for Bernard is their overarching goal. Infinitely dilating, framed but in no way contained by the artificial book-ends of London and Canterbury, The Canterbury Tales construct a middle space that is all motion, containing a vision of pilgrimage that does not end at the bones of a long dead martyr. In this world between worlds, Egeus declares in his inept but unexpectedly insightful way, "we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro" (Knight's Tale 2848): an extraordinary pilgrimage that is simultaneously towards and from, a journey without telos or simple origin, a journey of pure movement, pure encounter, pure becoming.

Chaucer's rhizomatic drift has allowed me to wax utopian, but in the end it is necessary to pull back and make one final observation about such assemblages of proliferation. Despite Benítez-Rojo's frequent claim that the meta-archipelago that he describes structurally excludes the possibility of violence, the history of the Caribbean would suggest otherwise. In the same way, even the extraordinary middle space that Chaucer envisions has its imperialistic movements of colonization, reclamation, and control. The action unfolds in distant geographies, but is always ultimately quite English. Although marked by occasional eruptions of Latin, French (the urbane friar of the Summoner's Tale, with his "je vous dy sanz doute") and Flemish (the proverbial quotation of the Cook's Tale, "sooth pley, quaad pley"), as well as regional English dialect (the "northernisms" of John and Aleyn in the Reeve's Tale), as a whole the Canterbury Tales are linguistically reductive, promulgating London English as the only possible literary language for the nation. The Canterbury Tales even contains a narrative which takes great joy in purging itself of non-Christian presence, reducing a ghetto which affronts Christian integrity with its resistant difference to a heap of mutilated and eternally silenced bodies (Prioress's Tale). The Jews suffer a doubled temporal death. Not only do they represent an anachronism for Christianity, since they refuse to believe that Christ is the messiah and therefore consign themselves to perpetual inhabitation of an outmoded Old Law, these Chaucerian corpses are a reminder of a specifically English history, the anti-Semitic violence of the twelfth and thirteenth century which culminated in the Expulsion of 1290. English national identity is sutured around the figure of the absent Jew, a body out of time which reminds not only of the violent limits of the British Isles as a medieval archipelago, but more generally of the centrality of bodies to any thinking about time.