I See It, but I'm Not Quite Sure What It Is

Below is my abstract for Queer Manuscripts Roundtable at the 2016 New Chaucer Society conference:

I See It, but I'm Not Quite Sure What It Is,

or The Discomfort with Cleanness as a Naked Text

Cotton Nero A.x holds two of the most beautifully crafted poems in Middle English—Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—which, although challenging in their fusion of religious and courtly values, seem intelligible compared to their abject, ugly sibling, Cleanness. We modern readers generally do not like Cleanness—it reads like a Westboro Baptist preacher’s call to join a wrathful God in hating faggots. But is that what Cleanness says, or is that what we expect Cleanness to say? I propose that by stripping Cleanness down to the flesh of its manuscript, eliminating its modern editorial features, we reveal a much more ambiguous textual body, the form of which seduces us with the pretense of an unspeakable secret even as it ultimately resists a singular reading.

Cleanness, in the flesh, reveals a structured body that does not quite correspond to its subject matter. Modern editors, attempting to make the text a bit straighter, have ignored the manuscript’s awkward textual divisions and have inserted notes to explain away ambiguities. Just as this queer text relates stories of bodies touching bodies (including the body of God), we must consider our carnal inter(t)action with the queer manuscript. We must ask what it means for one to desire amorous intimacy with an embodied, not-quite-male Jesus, as we explore this not-quite-readable poem. Only by learning to respect the text’s resistance to our appropriative desire for comprehension can we begin to recognize the text’s challenging polysemy that invites comparisons with its sister poems.