lol miller
This is funny even if you, like me, were never quite sure of your grasp of the lolcatz phenomenon.
booklust
The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook is out! See the table of contents and a tidbit here.
Lee Patterson on Lacan
Lee Patterson’s entire attack on Lacan seems to be based on undermining Freud — Lacan’s work is just “new wallpaper” in an old (crumbling) house. Since Freud is flawed, and Lacan called his work a return to Freud, returning to the attack on Freud is effectively demolishing Lacan’s position. “if the Freudian foundations on whch his work rests are unreliable, then his own enterprise…can hardly stand as an accurate account of human behavior.”
“Like Freud, Lacan presented his work as at once scientific (despite his disdain for evidence) and universalist.”
No, in fact, he didn’t.
Grendel and the gifstol
… or, Fun with Lacan and Zizek.
…Wæs seo hwil micel;
twelf wintra tid torn geþolode
wine Scyldinga, weana gehwelcne,
sidra sorga; forðam secgum wearð
ylda bearnum, undyrne cuð
gyddum geomore, þætte Grendel wan
hwile wið Hroþgar, heteniðas wæg,
fyrene ond fæhðefela missera,
singale sæce; sibbe ne wolde
wið manna hwone mægenes Deniga,
feorhbealo feorran, fea þingian,
ne þær nænig witena wenan þorfte
beorhtre bote to banan folmum;
ac se æglæca ehtende wæs,
deorc deaþscua, duguþe ond geogoþe,
seomade ond syrede; sinnihte heold
mistige moras; men ne cunnon,
hwyder helrunan hwyrftum scriþað.
Swa fela fyrena feond mancynnes,
atol angengea, oft gefremede,
herdra hynða; Heorot eardode,
sincfage sel sweartum nihtum;—
no he þone gifstol gretan moste,
maþðum for Metode, ne his myne wisse. (146-169)
The figure of the scop looms large in Beowulf, not least of all because the poem itself is a tale told to an audience who can recognize itself and the speaker in phrases like, “…We Gar-dena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, / hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” (1-3). The self-aware voice of the poet thus opens the poem, and the scop’s presence figures frequently throughout: in the hall the night before Grendel’s struggle with Beowulf (496), in the post-battle celebration to entertain with the story of Finn (1066), and in the journey back from the mere (868). It might further be argued that the scop has a hand in unleashing the fury of Grendel on Heorot, since it seems to be the noise of the harps and songs that drive him to attack the place of men: “þæt hé dógora gehwám dréam gehýrde/hlúdne in healle” (88-89). Grendel’s connection with the scop’s voice and with human sounds is perhaps worth examining in connection with his cannibalistic rampage.
In Seminar XI, Lacan refers to the objet petit a, the “thing” that stands in for the unattainable object of desire, “as the bone that got stuck in the subject’s throat” (Zizek “Grimaces of the Real” 49), thus rendering him incapable of speech, ensuring that “the voice…cannot burst out, unchain itself and thus enter the dimension of subjectivity” (Zizek, “Grimaces” 49). If we imagine the voices and sounds of the hall of the comitatus at Heorot the objects of Grendel’s inarticulate desire, and his lack of human shape and speech as rendering him impotent to participate in the human culture of the poem, then his desire to feast on the bodies and bones of men does result in the “bones” of his desire “getting stuck” in his throat. Zizek writes,
…the opposition between the silent and the vocalized scream coincides with that of enjoyment and Other: the silent scream attests to the subject’s clinging to enjoyment, to his or her unwillingness to exchange enjoyment (that is, the object that gives body to it) for the Other, for the Law, for the paternal metaphor, whereas the vocalization as such corroborates the choice that is already made and the subject’s place within the community. (Zizek “Grimaces” 50)
For Grendel, then, his consumption is a communion with mankind on his own terms, a communion which preserves his autonomy and rejects at least partially his sentence to remain “far from mankind” as a descendant of Cain (110). Grendel, thwarting the orders of the Father, gets as close to humans as he possibly can – he ingests them. And he feasts in apparent silence – the sounds that are relayed are the laments of the Danes upon waking to the remnants of his feast. Heorot is intact still, but as a feast-hall for monsters rather than men. It is not until Beowulf comes to challenge Grendel’s reign that Heorot suffers structural damage.
Beowulf and Grendel together participate in the damage done to Heorot during their wrestling-match, but it is Grendel’s scream that marks the real moment of his defeat and simultaneously strikes fear into the hearts of the Danes: Grendel sings “sigeléasne sang, sár wánigean” (787), and his “gryreléoð galan” marks the end of his engagement on his own terms with the halls of Heorot (786). Beowulf’s removal of his arm is only a formality, a seal on Grendel’s doom and a token of the imposition of the Law on Grendel’s body.
***
Zizek, Slavoj. “Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears.” October 58 (1991): 44-68.
Ranting about reading
I’m irate about something unrelated to William Morris, on the surface anyway, having recently read Gillian Overing’s 1993 response to criticism of her self-consciously theoretical work in Anglo-Saxon studies. [1] I have read Language, Sign, and Gender, and I didn’t agree with all of it either, but hearken to a reviewer’s fears: Overing and her ilk, part of a “postmodern craze for indeterminacy and fractured consciousness” and a “conspiracy to ‘re-mould [Beowulf] nearer to the Heart’s desire’” (Olsen 1026; Fitzgerald qtd. in Olsen 1026), could “destroy Beowulf for the next generation of readers” (Olsen 1026). [2] What mighty power lies in the selfish and willful mind and pen of Gillian Overing! Whatever privileges she gained, whatever credibility she garnered through years of study of the Anglo-Saxon language and its extant texts, she has surrendered in the eyes of her tribe through her careless allegiance to new-fangled ways that are not familiar to the kindred and not part of the time-honored traditions of the hall. Gillian Overing is outlaw.
My indignation at Olsen and the unpacked assumptions behind her statement about Overing’s capacity to “destroy Beowulf” make me feel immediately guilty about my dislike of Morris. I find myself in the bizarre position of feeling the need to defend William Morris from myself, despite my extreme annoyance with what I perceive to be his artificial diction and his irritating habit of having his characters lapse into a mishmash of hexameter in anapests and iambs. What, I must ask myself, do I want from Morris? Am I accustomed to Tolkien’s level of self-consciousness in fictionalizing a history that never was? Does Morris annoy because his fiction is not fiction enough, lacks some of the Elves and Orcs and imaginary languages that signal to us, from Tolkien’s pages, that there is a responsible and comfortable distance between the history that the author gestures towards and the head of the author himself, between what little we have in the way of recorded history and the figures that the author has created to populate a vision of it? Am I uneasy that his politics and his fiction seem intertwined? Is it the language of the foreword that bothers me, as it urges me to read on for my fill of “more tales of travel in an unspoiled wilderness” (9), or of the Tolkien-neglected “romance between men and women”? [3] Am I permitted to simply find the poetry bad in a rather painful way? I might be as guilty as Morris’ Fox, a “Markman to fight against the Markmen” (37), in wrinkling my nose at Morris’ prose without clearly articulating just what it is I find troublesome about it. And if it’s the aura of romance he conjures around a mythical past that seems like, but can’t possibly be, a historical past, then I’m a terrible hypocrite indeed, since I seem to believe, on a larger scale, that fiction should be allowed to be read as fiction, whether it’s Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry or a Symbolist poet’s musings on the power of a color; that is to say, it can and should be interpreted and discussed by people who are allowed to admit they are people, and who aren’t required to leave their subjectivity at the door when they embark on a study of Old English grammar.
C. S. Lewis praised Morris’ tales because they seemed true (8), and he considered Morris successful in his efforts to try the “old wine” in “new wineskins” (8); he noted a division in the “modern literary world” between “militant Christians” and “the convinced materialists” (8), but was convinced that both sides of the divide could find something of worth in Morris’ romances. A similar chasm exists between scholars like Overing and her “opponents,” who charge her with ruining perfectly good Anglo-Saxon poetry by either failing to try to interpret it or else by approaching its interpretation wrong-headedly, depending on which sentence you read of her attackers. Die-hard positivists might take a page from materialists in their wariness of the filter of human subjectivity and interpretation; those committed to a Christian or metaphysical view of the world might have something in common with schools of criticism that not only recognize but celebrate humanity’s seeming inability to distance itself and the texts it engages from extra-textual frameworks. As in the contemporary debates over creationism versus evolution, one is pressed to take sides and to see those sides as mutually exclusive. Refusal to do so leaves one little room to stand under any clearly identifiable standard or banner on the Hill of Speech. There is – incredibly — a battle being waged over who “owns” Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I realize that I have something in common with Morris and his socialist vision of the imaginary Wolfings, amongst whom land was held in common and even thralls share ownership in poetry (and indeed, burst into it at incredibly awkward times).
[1] Overing, Gillian. “Recent Writing on Old English: A Response.” Aestel 1 (1993). Available online: http://members.aol.com/mcnelis/AEstel1/Overing1.html
[2] Olsen, Alexandra. “Review, Language Sign and Gender in Beowulf.” Speculum 67 (1992): 1024-1026.
[3] Morris, William. More to William Morris. Michael Perry, ed. Seattle: Inkling Books, 2003.
Slouching Towards Extimacy 