This dissertation, Poynts: Impatient Desires, Material Attachments, and the Pearl-Poet, takes as its creative spur the concept of a geometric “point”—the partless, shapeless indicator of zero-dimensionality that resists comprehension barring the aid of an accidental, dimensioned thing. Most often conflated with termini or teloi, points are frequently imagined to serve as a limit, containing or confining structural possibilities; however, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue in Mille plateaux, “creative” points might exist between lines or planes, only hinted at through processual encounters, such as a relay in nomadic wandering or the deterritorializing vectors of polyphonic or serialist music. Unlike les points discernables that delimit structure (what I refer to throughout the dissertation as spots), true points are indiscernables (what I refer toas a poynt) and promise an unrealized though immanent possible reality that exists outside of the presently available structures for engaging the world.
This dissertation takes as its primary focus the four fourteenth-century poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, poems commonly attributed to the anonymous author known as the Pearl-Poet. The Pearl-Poet’s poetry is rife with ambivalence: He proposes the possibility of discovering a better, presently unknowable world that requires the suspension of affective attachment to material reality, even as his protagonists repeatedly, though sympathetically, fail to achieve this affective suspension. Describing this suspension as “patience” in his third poem, and insisting somewhat esoterically that “patience is a poynt,” the Pearl-Poet invites the reader to consider how such suspension of the actual in order to discover the possible recalls traditions contemporary to his own poetry that seek to discover indiscernible points, traditions such as geometry, music theory, and physics, each of which I consider in my reading of the poems. Further, I read the poems alongside late medieval works of (mostly vernacular) mystical theology, especially theological texts that toed the line of heresy by imagining the possibility of a kingdom of heaven “here and now”, a utopic present that could (for the purposes of maintaining orthodoxy) only exist fleetingly in a poynt—a particular affective point of contact in a particular place that could last no longer than a sudden ecstatic moment. Drawing on these various discourses, I argue that the Pearl-Poet considers the unexplored structural possibilities promised by the poynt in each of his poems, where failures to maintain the poynt’s creative possibilities results in a deadening, static spot (a word the Poet uses in all of its polysemous complexity to mean place, stain, dimensioned dot, sin).
I frame my reading of Cotton Nero A.x with Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic method, especially as it is practiced in Mille plateaux, which I situate in its own post-May‘68 context. By considering the revolutionary project of Deleuze and Guattari alongside some of their critical predecessors such as Jean Barraqué and Søren Kierkegaard, I read in the Pearl-Poet’s ambivalent poetry a shimmer of a more heterogeneous Middle Ages. I consider how the premodern thought of medieval poetry can offer unexpected models for revolutionary thinking that challenge, undermine, or reimagine the very forms of thought taken for granted by modern epistemologies. I propose, through these challenges to the “modern”, that such poetry serves to imagine alternative models for a new kind of agency within structural conditions where such agency seems impossible.
