Gawain's Mythic Penis

Gawain’s Mythic Penis: Castration Anxiety and the Problems of
 Mastery in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain suffers from castration anxiety—a problem for the Arthurian figure whose virile penis is traditionally the most active agent in defining his hyper-masculine personality. His anxiety results in part from a touch, like Dinshaw’s “queer touch”—a touch of the emasculating narratives of Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. In each of the three other texts, homonyms, puns, and the resulting equivocality of poetic language significantly undermine a mastery of language, opening up possibilities for misreading, for excess, for new possibilities, and thus for a space of desire. The poet takes such a desire-focused poetics from his one named, non-biblical source, the Roman de la rose, where desire, figured by the goddess Venus, comes into being when Jupiter castrates Saturn, springing from the spume of the castrated testicles, and simultaneously giving birth to equivocal language. The Golden Age, defined by perfect sufficiency, comes to an end at the same time that Saturn’s masculine intactness ends, and thus, like in our own present Oedipal imaginary, desire and its relation to difference and to language is born out of (the threat of) castration.

            The cutting that happens in SGGK happens on New Years, a day commemorating the cutting of a different God’s genitals—the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. At the alienating threat of the Green Knight’s presence, Gawain decides to take control, and rather than just a mere slit on the neck (like circumcision), Gawain chops the whole thing off (like castration); but only to discover that his castrating act has resulted in a counter-chop. Gawain has misunderstood the game; he has taken seriously what the Green Knight only meant playfully. Gawain’s too hasty attempts at understanding, at mastering his situation without submitting to nuance or alternative possibilities (a very masculine tendency), results in his feminization—a no-longer-virile Gawain kissing Lord Bertilak while secretly wearing his wife’s clothing. “Are you Gawain??” Lady Bertilak asks him, and he is no longer sure.

Each of these texts offers a similar queer touch—the dreamer in Pearl learns that he must be a pearl-bedecked bride of Christ if he wants to enter the New Jerusalem; the reader of Cleanness, whose ability to comprehend a “natural” definition for the titular virtue is frequently undermined by “unnatural” poetic différance, learns to seduce Jesus as his beloved in the same way that (the male) Amant seduces (the male) Bel Acueil in the Rose; and Jonah, whose control of language is challenged by a God who frequently undermines his notions of “truth” and “justice,” learns that patience—or even passivity—is sometimes more important than mastery. The Gawain who fears castration, and who comes to realize that he has always already been castrated, becomes the model reader for the other three poems, and he comes to reflect the reader’s own desire for wholeness, a wholeness figured through the nostalgia of Arthuriana (and the nostalgic framing of SGGK more specifically), but one that is undone by the compilational reading of Cotton Nero A.x.

Embracing Alterity

Below is an abstract for the paper I will present at the University of Virginia's "Method and the Middle English Text" conference  in April, 2016:

Embracing Alterity: Queer Historicism, Individualizing Difference, and
the Value of Periodization

“History is, and has always been, an erogenous zone,” Aranye Fradenburg argues in Sacrifice Your Love, and, as such, we ought to consider historicism as a space of intimate interaction, driven by fantasies and desires, likenesses and differences. In this paper, I revisit questions concerning history and our relationship to it, raised by historicism’s overwhelming emphasis on both the alterity of the past and the necessity for objective observations; and I propose that we ought to literalize the notion of relationship by thinking of it in terms of desires, bodies and pleasures, along lines similar to Carolyn Dinshaw’s “queer touch” in Getting Medieval. Following the “Temporal Turn” in Queer Theory, especially the works of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman (along with Dinshaw), Queer Theory has opened ways of drawing attention to and critiquing overly simplified, reified “identity categories” of periodization; however, the non-identitarian approaches of many recent queer historicists have resulted in the potential for universalizing views of history, erasing the importance of difference (and its slippery, metaleptic relationship to the “hetero”) through their praise of similarity (homo), espoused most notably in the “homohistory/unhistoricism” of Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg. By ignoring the importance of identity categories (i.e. periodization), (post-)modernism becomes the invisible and hegemonic lens from which everything is read, resulting in a further abjection of any difference (including, still, the premodern) because of its failure to correspond to modern readers concerns or tastes, and leading to temporal relations that are strikingly ordinary, disembodied, even normal (anything but queer). I propose that queer historicists must consider the most recent work of queer theorists incorporating identity-politics and embodiment-focused approaches (critical race theory, disability studies, trans* studies) in ways that continue to allow for the “non-identity” of queer, while maintaining the importance of individuation and embodiment. Further, I think that Leo Bersani’s “impersonal narcissism” model, a model that celebrates relational likeness despite a lack of exact similarity, might serve as the best model from which we can break down the divisive, “objective” barriers of history’s alterity, celebrate our intimate interactions with history, yet maintain the level of differentiation necessary for any complex relationship to function.

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.

Puking Out Pearls

Below is my abstract for the 2015 BABEL Working Group conference:

Lady Gaga is fabulous. She came out on the scene with a fabulous single and a fabulous album about being fabulous, and we were all starstruck; we were also seduced by her illegibility. We wanted her to be a man, dressed as a woman. We wanted evidence of a penis behind the layers of glitter, makeup, wigs, and bubbles. Gaga performed femininity in a way that recalled and surpassed drag queens, and we were, ironically, confused at her female body—What could it mean for a woman to play at being a woman? Starting from this illegibility, Gaga carefully cultivated a persona that not only performed the fabulosity she articulated in her music, but also exposed the mechanisms of legibility in what Benjamin has called the age of mechanical reproduction—Gaga became intertextual with herself, and we began to feel like we understood her without fully understanding her.

            Terence Koh is fabulous. When the artist was asked to explain his fabulous appearance, he responded, “That is my nature. Perhaps we shouldn’t interview with what happens most naturally.” Koh’s fabulosity is natural, and it is artificial; it is truth, but, in his art, truth is deception and self-deception: “I get scared and don’t want to know the truth…. I tink [sic] this way there could be world peace. And really people would just be more happy.” Koh has cultivated a look, a phonetic/homonymic writing style, a form of artwork featuring “layered insincerity,” and the slopes of his performed self are always a bit slippery—his natural artifice (or artificial nature) blurs boundaries between legibility and illegibility. Sometimes not asking questions reveals the most answers. Maybe, Koh teaches us, the essence is not as important as the meaningfulness of the surface.[1]

            Pearls are fabulous. Terence and Gaga collaborated on a fabulous video and a fabulous performance featuring fabulous pearls—88 pearls to be in/exact (which might mean something)—and these fabulous pearls might also remind us of many fabulous people’s disease and death.[2]

            Un/like Gaga and Terence, the Pearl-maiden is fabulous. She lives in a jewel-encrusted world of numeric complexity (which also might mean something). She reminds us of daughters and statues, idolatry and death. She reminds us of the kingdom of heaven and wealth, whores and lambs. Can we ingest her, or does she resist consumption? All we know, by the end of the poem, is that we have never seen anyone more fabulous.

*     *     *

Frustrated and confused at my writing style, my professor recently wrote to me: “[Your] essay sometimes feels merely clever rather than substantial. It is charming, but it entails too much rhetorical performance, too little sustained analysis.” Exploring the meaningful absurdity of Lady Gaga’s and Terence Koh’s fabulous resistances to legibility, I would like to consider what might be gained from reading the maiden in Pearl through the lens of clever and charming rhetorical performance and what might be lost if we care too deeply about traditions of  “substantial… sustained analysis.” My talk will be fabulous.

---

[1] “Down the Bunny Hole,” interview by Kathy Grayson <http://terencekoh.com/hole/down-the-bunny-hole>

[2] Lady Gaga and Terence Koh collaborated for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. After sipping from a teacup on top of a piano, Lady Gaga spits out a mouthful of pearls, which Koh describes as “puking out beautiful things.” <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lady-gaga-salutes-elton-john-with-special-set-at-all-star-amfar-gala-20100211>

Beautiful Filth

Below is my abstract for the 2015 Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo:

Beautiful Filth: Cleanness’s Sensually Appealing Sins and the

Dirtiness of the Incarnation

Cleanness begins with a seemingly straightforward distinction—clean things are beautiful and filthy things are not.  If we could trust the poet’s logic, we would safely be able to assume that an object must be clean if it appeals to our senses through its “fayre formez.”  The poem’s first biblical allusion, the parable of the wedding feast, seems to continue this argument by proposing that ugly things do not have a place in the kingdom of heaven, but those that are “frely and fresch fonde” and “fetyse of a fayr forme” are acceptable in God’s sight. The poem’s succeeding exempla each present to the reader sensually enticing descriptions that stand out from the text’s emphasis on filth and destruction through the detailed precision of the poet’s language; however, the beauty of these things is realized as damnably dangerous—as the very snare that leads to the sinners’ destruction in the poem.  The poet’s sensual appeals to the readers are, in fact, acts of violence: the shining glory of Lucifer, the fair faces of the antediluvian races, the sway of the beardless angels’ hips as they enter Sodom, and the intricately detailed description of the Solomonic vessels at Belshazzar’s feast each appeal to the readers’ senses, and we, too, want to touch, to smell, to taste, to know, the delights that such forbidden fruits possess behind their shining exteriors.  We become sympathetically entangled with the most damnable figures in Biblical history, and we must repeatedly experience the horrific ugliness of God’s wrath, directed toward our newfound acquaintances.  The poet has seductively violated us by forcing us to confront our own filthy desires.

God’s own cleanness is not very pretty, and only by recognizing the offensiveness of the filth of his incarnation (born in the rottenness [rote] of a stable) can we begin to understand the complexities of filth and beauty.  Only by following the circumlocutionary logic of beautiful filth (or filthy beauty) can we begin to discover how to play safely with the sensually appealing things of the world, like a lover’s body or the Roman de la Rose.  Cleanness’s own form, the messiness of which continues to challenge scholars, resists the sterile, idolizing fetishizations found within its exempla and demands a closer, more fruitful analysis on its proper use.

Æþelðryþe

Maybe the island is herself.

And the eels, everywhere.

Is it even an island?  Water?

Or maybe it’s not-water.

She longs for, she desires, the shore

Following the shipwreck.

God keeps wrecking the ship, though.

And he keeps asking her to get back on the ship.

And he keeps wrecking the ship.

Does he wreck the island, too?

The sea is too deep.

The stream is safe.

The stream is contained.

The stream has borders, and I can see the other side.

These marshes don’t even merit the name of a stream.

Can I trust you in the sea?

I don’t see the other side.

I’m scared of drowning, but here we are.

Jouissance.  Or maybe only partly.

Do you love me?

If you love me, you will keep my commandments:

Get back on the boat.

But the sea is so deep--

Isn’t it?  Don’t you know?

If we are the island, can we ever drown?

I’m scared