Al Sharif al-Taliq and Lacan

I found Richard Serrano's article "Al-Sharif al-Taliq, Jacques Lacan, and the Poetics of Abbreviation," a little problematic because I wasn't sure exactly how his conception of the writer trying to conceal or cover "the original trauma of the poem" in Lacanian terms differed from the way poetry normally works. I also wasn't sure, moreover, how his employment of Lacan's theories differed from conventional literary interpretation.

He states that the trauma is an event that exists beyond or before language, behind the "accessible Symbolic Order," and that attempts to describe or relate trauma via language also, necessarily, obscure it. He writes, "Attempts to account for this moment - and, simultaneously, to hide it - result in language that constantly obscures the original trauma yet relentlessly points back to it" (141). So - if I'm understanding this right - if I attempted to relate via writing a traumatic experience, I would simultaneously obscure the original traumatic episode with imperfect language and, at the same time, still refer to it because it is the point of my writing.

But how does this differ from the way poetry normally works? Metaphors, similes, figures of speech, etc. all operate to point to an experience but, since they cannot perfectly render the experience for us, they could also be said to obscure said experience at the same time. And, of course, we measure a poet by how well he employs metaphors, similes, figures of speech, etc. which ties into Serrano's idea that the "cover up" functions as a mechanism for self-glorification for the poet. My point is, though, that you can get to his conclusion without having to resort to Lacanian theory or employ such terms as "trauma" or "psychoanalysis."

I just had a lot of "duh" moments as I was reading the article and I got the feeling that Serrano was hiding behind the buzz word "Lacan" whilst performing good, old-fashioned literary interpretation.

The Ending of "Silence"

We'll soon be coming to the ending of Silence which, I'm going to assume, will frustrate a lot of people. I'm not sure what I was expecting regarding Silence's end as I read through the text but I know that I was not expecting the ending we got. Prof. Wenthe noted that I argued in my presentation that the ending of Silence need not be a statement that the restoration of gender categories wins at the end of the day and I hold by that statement which puts me at odds with Sharon Kinoshita. But I don't know if I would say that I am optimistic - as Prof. Wenthe puts it - about the ending. The ending to me just represents one of the many ways that gender can manifest itself in the text and need not represent THE way - hence, possibility as opposed to limitation. Otherwise, Silence's end would be a major letdown.

I think the text practices a form of contained subversion which would address why the text seemingly seems to reinforce traditional conceptions of gender while, at the same time, reinforcing a less conventional, more unstable one. In order for the text to "pass" it must conform to normative values and ideologies but underneath this layering is one that threatens to plunge these same normative values and ideologies into disarray. And, so, Silence's end is just a ruse (I hope) in order to deflect attention away from those aspects of the text that might be deemed too controversial or revolutionary.

It's unfortunate that we have no record of its reception in the thirteenth century because I think such information would really help us determine what may or may not be happening in the text.

Parzival's Damsels in Distress

Sharon Kinoshita, in an article titled "The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d'Orange and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen," argues that possession of the Saracen woman became a surrogate for and a means of possession of the Saracen world. She examines Orable from La Prise d'Orange and argues that Guillaume Fierebrace's conquest of her is really a symbolic conquest of the city. I think this also rings true for the possession of women - both Saracen and not - in Parzival; more often than not, the women are linked to a throne or region that needs governance and the knight who "wins" her almost always "wins" a kingdom in the process.

After Gahmuret and the Queen of Zazamanc unite, the Queen makes clear what the noble knight has won: "I and my lands are subject to this knight," she declares to her people and she later echoes this sentiment via her letter: "Return, and from my hands receive a crown, sceptre and kingdom that have been bequeathed to me" (49). Likewise, Condwiramurs is trying to protect both "land and person" from Clamide's "wooing" and, instead, "bestowed her lands and castles on him [Parzival], for he was the darling of her heart" (110). The woman-land conflation is all over Parzival and seems to suggest that women's bodies do not function merely as their own but also as cultural signifiers.

Kinoshita's above article implies that women's bodies act as signifiers for their culture; that, essentially, the representation of conquest of an entire people can be brought out by the conquest of a single individual. This is problematic because this "site" then becomes a figurative battlefield as opposed to belonging to the individual herself thus raising the question: what would happen if women became agents and knights of their own, pursuing lands and saving others from harm, as opposed to acting as signs for conquest or the conquered?

Brunhild in "The Nibelungenlied"

The Nibelungenlied's Brunhild seems, on the surface, to be a proto-feminist type. She is a mighty sovereign in her own right and vies with men at throwing javelins. She participates in masculine warrior culture and is a formidable opponent to even the bravest warrior. And, yet, for all her strength and shrewdness, she takes part in the masculine warrior culture without challenging or subverting cultural norms that relegate women to mere prizes for marriage. Her unusual strength, even, makes her more of a spectacle than a symbol for female empowerment.

All of the women in The Nibelungenlied are given in marriage by their male protectors usually in exchange for a certain favor or desirable outcome. Gunther, for instance, promises Kriemhild to Siegfried in exchange for Siegfried's help in overcoming Brunhild: "I will do it," Siegried tells Gunther, "if you will give me your sister fair Kriemhild, the noble princess...I wish no other reward for my trouble" (54). They're not subtle about it - Kriemhild is, in effect, a prize for a certain type of requested behavior. It's what we expect and I doubt many of us are surprised by it; what I found surprising, however, is that Brunhild offers herself as a literal prize to suitors. Gunther and Siegfried talk of "winning" the Icelandic queen suggesting that, just as Kriemhild is part of an exchange that reduces her to a "reward" or prize, so too is Brunhild.

One could probably point to Brunhild's astonishing strength and superhuman abilities as evidence that she is challenging conventional notions of femininity and, yet, her strength reinforces the concept of woman as object or spectacle. While she claims on pg. 60 of our text that neither her nor her ladies are to stand at the windows "as a spectacle for strangers" she, only six pgs later, renders herself a literal spectacle by hurling heavy boulders and throwing javelins and combating with Gunther-Siegfried. She may be a formidable opponent but she's also taking part in a discourse that monopolizes on the belief that women are objects by, in effect, becoming an object to watch.

The part that is most disturbing to me is, as mentioned above, she enters into this discourse of her own accord. She makes herself a spectacle and she makes herself a prize. But, I guess, you could argue that just by taking matters into her own hands she is making a powerful statement about female agency and initiative...or, on the flipside, she's just reinforcing masculine warrior culture at her own expense.

Women and Guile in SGGK

I came across some lines in SGGK that reminded me of some current research I'm doing for my mentored scholarly essay on the presumed affinity between women and jinn in the medieval Islamic imagination; a lot of what I've read so far seems to position this affinity in women's presumed tendency towards "guile." It's such a funny word that the following SGGK lines really jumped out at me: "But no wonder if a fool should fall for a female / and be wiped of his wits by womanly guile - / it's the way of the world" (2414-16). The Middle English word used in the poem is "wyles" or wiles or trickery suggesting that women and trickery, or guile, go hand in hand.

The SGGK lines reminded me of the opening of The Arabian Nights where King Shahrayar, upset that his wife has been having an affair, leaves his kingdom with his brother. After he sets out, he comes upon an ifrit and a young woman; after the young woman tricks him and his brother into having intercourse with her, he swears off all womankind and claims that their "guile is great." This tendency towards guile, towards trickery, has become a conventional characterization of women in traditional Islamic literatures but it is, of course, a convention in traditional Western literatures as well with Eve functioning as the prototype.

It begs the following questions: What does it mean that this concept of "woman's guile" surfaces in a text like SGGK and Islamic literary texts, such as The Arabian Nights? What is it about women that makes them such easy targets for such characterizations?

One critic I have been reading for my mentored scholarly essay, Nawal El Saadawi, posits that, before patriarchal religions and systems took root, representations of strong female goddesses were common but that they steadily declined once patriarchal religions became more popular. You can see this a little bit with the clash between "Morgan the Goddess" and the Christian faith that Sir Gawain embodies. El Saadawi argues that, in order for patriarchal systems of thought to set itself against what came before, it had to discredit the competing ideologies and one way to do so was to rewrite representations of strong women as threatening or evil. We can certainly see this operating, to some extent, in SGGK and other texts whereby women are credited for introducing or maintaining evil in the world and, to be closer to God and Christ, is to also distance yourself away from women. It's one way to explain why such characterizations of women, as embodiments of guile and deception, were so popular.

Dame Ragnelle and Queen Bramimonde

I found The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle the most interesting of the three Sir Gawain poems we had to read for Monday's class. The character of Dame Ragnelle is truly fascinating: she is monstrous, "she was as ungoodly a creature / As evere man sawe, withoute mesure" (228-9), she exhibits agency and a desire for "sovereynte" and, after her marriage to a knight and magical transformation into the most beautiful woman at court, is also magically transformed into an obedient wife. Her trajectory in the poem reminded me of the Saracen princess or queen who displays all the qualities that are disdained in a good Christian woman but is still considered a herione and, upon marriage to a knight and conversion from paganism, becomes the perfect wife.

In many ways we can think of Dame Ragnelle as a proto-feminist: she wishes, above all, for autonomy. She is shrewd and she is bold and she is willing to risk disloyalty to the only family member we know of, her mischief making brother Sir Gromer Somer. She is similar to Queen Bramimonde who also exhibits her own agency and has no problem hurling curses at her own gods thus demonstrating that she, too, is willing to exhibit disloyalty to religion and family which is only further confirmed by her later conversion. Both are willful women who are tamed by marriage and absorption into a new society. Dame Ragnelle, despite her insistence that all women really want sovereignty, is all too happy to give this up, voluntarily, upon her marriage to Sir Gawain and Bramimonde-Juliana becomes fully absorbed into Christian society as a mild mannered lady.

For all the parallels, however, it is the difference between Dame Ragnelle and the typical Saracen princess/queen that struck me. Dame Ragnelle is ugly, is monstrous, is so completely other, whereas medieval poems typically portray the Saracen princess as beautiful, alluring and, most importantly, white. (I know there are cases when she is black but, as far as I know, when she converts to Christianity her blackness melts away into whiteness.) The Saracen princess is exactly like a Christian heroine except she is willful and disobedient to her family and faith. These kinks, as it were, are remedied upon her conversion and marriage whereupon she is transformed into the good Christian woman. In the Saracen princess case, her monstrosity is her paganism and sense of agency which can be changed by conversion. In Dame Ragnelle's case, however, she may already be Christian but she is willful and disobedient and, most importantly, really really ugly. The Saracen princess is admired for her beauty, already in a sense belonging to the society that she will join at the end of the poem, but there is no place for Dame Ragnelle and she has to force her way into society where she is barely tolerated. It begs the question: what is the function of Dame Ragnelle's monstrosity? Is it caused, in part, by her agency and willfulness or is that just a symptom of it?

In both cases, however different on the surface, there are two women who are figured as monstrous - one for her geographic location and one for her appearance - and a marriage to a knight is central to her transformation, not only into an acceptable Christian lady who must look the part, but also one who must act the part.

The Monstrous Female Body in "Beowulf"

Beowulf states in the poem "Sorrow not, wise one! It is always better / to avenge one's friend than to mourn overmuch" (1384-1385). That is, of course, unless you are a woman. For a woman to avenge one's friend, or one's son as illustrated by the actions of Grendel's mother, is problematic - in Beowulf such a woman functions as a perversion of the ideal female in Danish society. For a woman to exhibit agency is figured as fearful, threatening, even monstrous. Women, particularly women's bodies, have always posed a threat to society and Grendel's mother is just another to add to the list.

Jane Chance, in "The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's Mother," convincingly argues that the function of Grendel's mother in the poem is to represent everything a woman should not be and do: she should not avenge her son's death, she should not show agency but, rather, passivity in matters of state, she should not exhibit pride, etc. Because Grendel's mother does show agency she is figured as monstrous and it is made clear in the poem that there is no room for her in respectable Danish society. And, yet, upon first read I found myself almost sympathizing with Grendel's mother - she has just lost her son and, in a society that places signficance on vengence and kinship, I thought it was only normal for her to want to avenge her son.

Over the centuries, women's bodies have always held a certain amount of fascination for some but, unfortunately, this fascination has usually morphed into disgust and evidence for their affinity towards less Godly, and more monstrously demonic, forces. The body of Grendel's mother is an example of this. She is the only mother in the poem to give birth and raise a son without a father-figure. In fact, it is not altogether clear if there ever was a father at all thereby endowing the body of Grendel's mother with unfathomable powers which would, undoubtedly, seem threatening to the male dominated society of the Danes. Moreover, her battle with Beowulf is imbued with sexual overtones which could further suggest fear of female sexuality. It is only natural, then, that she should be a monster as the perversions she represents would not be embodied by a good Danish woman.

Looking Back in Beowulf

R. M. Liuzza states in our Intro to Beowulf that the average reader approaches the text with the expectation that s/he will come face to face with the "collective unconscious of English culture, [that the text] will allow him to experience at first hand what is primordial, elemental and primitively powerful in it." But, he goes on to say, the reader finds that Beowulf does not contain anything we might call primorodial but is, itself, looking back as well (17). It's as if we are reading an epic about the making of an epic. This raises the question as to whether there is anything "primordial" or "elemental" in any culture or literature or whether whatever is deemed to be "primoridial" is, itself, contingent on the age (among many other things).

This idea of looking back has always fascinated me as it has fascinated many who are interested in understanding, not only literary or nationalisitic origins, but also human ones. The Victorian period is wrought with novels and essays and poems about looking backwards to our past, our primal ancestors, at the same time that they are fervently pushing forward with industrialization and modernization. This idea that we cannot move forward without taking stock of our origins is not a new one and it seems to be operating in Beowulf in a fundamental way.

I should say at this point that I have only done the reading for our first Beowulf meeting - just wrapped up the battle and defeat of Grendel. It seems to me to be a battle between the hero, Beowulf, and the very material and extremely hostile world in which Beowulf must decide what man he will be and what he will fight/stand for. This battle becomes a microcosm for the world at large that is taking stock of the kind of nation and people they want to be. They must rid themselves of the past that no longer serves them (and maybe Grendel is a symbolic stand-in for paganism?) before they can move forward to what seems to be a more Christian future. They must, in a sense, come to terms about their past before they can move forward.

Swooning in "The Song of Roland"

While I thought that Sharon Kinoshita's article was persuasive and illuminating in its discussion of the deployment of gender, I still think the world of The Song of Roland is primarily a man's world. It's a world of knights and war and territorial expansion and homosocial relationships between men. And, yet, it's also a world where there is a considerable amount of weeping and fainting, two activities that have been traditionally associated with women. I kept finding myself saying aloud, as I was reading Roland, "Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!" courtesy of Jane Austen, because it's a marvel that these knights and warriors, who pierce each other with lances and see bowels and brains spill out of their companions, would have the sort of constitution that would resort to swooning when they are overcome with emotions. I agree with Kinoshita that the poem "is haunted by a crisis of nondifferentiation" when it comes to the Christians and Saracens but it is also haunted, to some extent, by this same crisis when it comes to gender. The men are brave and noble just as they are affectionate and emotional.

The Introduction to my copy of Roland, by Dorothy L. Sayers, does mention that by the standards of feudal epic this sort of behavior is correct as the death of a beloved nephew or close friend warrants weeping and swooning and would not have been perceived as a character weakness in the eleventh century. She states that "the idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin" (15). Fainting, especially by the thousands, is depicted as heroic and epic and perfectly acceptable in the poem. To be affectionate or overly emotional is somehow linked with the noble world of knights which raises questions about gender differentiation. Fainting in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, is usually depicted as proof of the weak constitution of women or it is parodied, usually as it relates to women. It would be interesting to trace this shift in public perception and breakdown, the shift from a knightly attribute to a female one, an illustration of heroism to one of weakness or absurdity.

Names in The Lais of Marie de France

I was intrigued by today's class discussion regarding the absence of names for the female characters in Marie's lais. It's especially intriguing given the historical and literary interest in Marie's own name and the absence of information regarding anything other than a first name that may or may not be the right name. Following Bloch's discussion of language and sexual jealousy in our reading for this week, I wonder if Marie consciously (or subconsciously) aligned the mastery of women with the mastery of language and, finding that total mastery is impossible, sought to indicate that by giving us a glaring textual gap as represented by the absence of women's names.

I will say, at the onset, that Prof. Wenthe's comment in class today that the absence of women's names could indicate the interchangeability of women in medieval times is both persuasive and, perhaps, likely. But, again following Bloch, if we are meant to read ourselves in the text, to even supplant the writer, then I find myself automatically trying to make Marie more of a feminist, or a proto-feminist, than good sense would probably allow. So I'll apologize for that in advance.

Bloch argues that sexual jealousy is analogous to Marie's fear of misappropriation, that just as "Marie is deviled by the linguistic duplicity of words, no matter how finely they are assembled, are unfaithful, they betray" (45), so are the husbands also aware of the potential duplicity of their wives - they may be both faithful or adulterous. Such suspicion translates into a desire to control or master - to lock into a tower, say - but Marie, from the onset, admits that she cannot totally master language. She states in the Prologue that the reader has a role to play in the acquisition of meaning, that meaning is something that happens in the space between the text and reader and not inherent in the words themselves. She cannot master language just as many of the husbands cannot control their wives. The absence of a name, the absence of a fixed meaning, could suggest to the reader that total mastery and control of anything, really, is impossible. The women, while not fixed in a name, are, concurrently, also not mastered. They are not mastered through language nor through their husbands' actions.

Admittedly, not being fixed in a name could just mean that you are expendable or interchangeable, which just takes us back to Prof. Wenthe's comment in class, but it could also mean that they, in some fashion, escape certain forms of mastery and control.