Flesh and Word

Sarah Künzler

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110455427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.

1Introduction

Kein Bild, damit das Bild über die Sprache entstehen kann.2

1.1Bodies and Mediality: Mapping Horizons

Bringing together bodies and mediality in the study of medieval texts is perhaps comparable to the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (‘The Voyage of St Brendan’), an Irish hagiographical text that in content and structure resembles the Immrama, the Irish voyage tales. In search of the Terra Repromissionis, Saint Brendan and his companions navigate (somehow) biblical yet still distinctly Irish scenery in a small boat. Throughout their journey, they visit various islands, never quite sure what awaits them there, how this microcosm might function, what the inhabitants will look like and what surprises and challenges lie ahead. Discussing broad concepts such as bodies and mediality in literary criticism is similar to exploring these islands, as the concepts can relate differently in each text and in their plurality exhibit almost unlimited potential for creating meaning. This project, therefore, permits a variety of possible approaches. Selecting a focus, the islands to visit, so to speak, is crucial to avoid getting lost in the sea of bodies in medieval texts. On the other hand, the various possible glances on bodies allow a researcher to navigate new routes, to focus on hitherto unnoticed or overlooked particularities. This is what this study seeks to offer.

Because terms such as mediality and body are used so broadly in contemporary research, there arises a need to critically engage with one’s own understanding of the concepts before the individual textual analyses and to continuously reassess and develop this understanding. This introduction attempts to delineate an overview of the two concepts at the heart of this study. It also outlines the general approach to the texts and briefly introduces the genres and texts discussed in the individual chapters.

Bodies are the focus of a large number of studies on contemporary subjects in the humanities. Yet to discuss bodies in medieval texts in relation to their function in mediality discourse is a comparatively new approach. It may surprise my own generation of students and scholars that until relatively recently, bodies had gone somewhat unnoticed in humanities research in relation to any such concepts – they seem to have been quite simply overlooked. It is only in the past two decades that bodies have started to appear more and more in humanities research as the prime focus of attention. While in 1994 ELIZABETH GROSZ still found that the body ‘has remained a conceptual blind spot’3 in various fields, the last decade in particular has seen bodies being studied and explored from countless perspectives. As a researcher in this area, one is aware that critical voices may even bemoan that the body is creeping in everywhere: in every academic field, every period and also in every library and curriculum. A possible response to this statement is that bodies, far from creeping in, were always already there. The body’s former ‘absent presence’4, as CHRIS SHILLING terms it, has simply been replaced by an ever-present presence; where they had been overlooked before, bodies were now inspected from various angles. This eventually led to an interdisciplinary field of research in the humanities, often referred to as body criticism.

What has changed with the emergence of body criticism is that bodies are now understood and observed as complex semiotic entities. CAROLINE WALKER BYNUM emphasises that in previous research it was often accepted that ‘[f]rom Plato to Descartes, the Western tradition was […] dualist’5, that is, adhering to theories which propose a (however rigid) distinction between mind (soul, spirit) and matter (the body). Until the second half of the twentieth century, the body was often perceived as belonging entirely to nature, as being merely a material container of the soul. This philosophical dualism is not reflected in all medieval sources and its prevalence in Western thought has also been challenged. In relation to medieval eschatological literature, BYNUM finds that ‘theorists […] tended to talk of the person not as soul but as soul and body’ and that ‘a number of scholars have established [that] Platonic definitions of the person as the soul were explicitly rejected by the middle of the twelfth century’6, a period from and after which the majority of the texts discussed here stem. BYNUM’S findings suggest that, in some areas of medieval thought, bodies were not as removed from the construction of identity as previous research had claimed.

In the humanities, however, bodies were seen as rooted in biological discourse(s) for a considerable time. JACQUES Le GOFF and NICOLAS TRUONG, for instance, remark that ‘[d]ans la discipline historique, longtemps a régné l’idée que le corpse appartenait á la nature, et non la culture.’7 The proclamation that the body is part of and shaped by culture was first articulated in the second half of the twentieth century. As MAKIKO KUWAHARA summarises: ‘Adopting and developing the phenomenological approaches of Husserl (1889) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), which are out of historical and social context, Foucault (1973, 1978 and 1979) and Bourdieu (1977) demonstrate that the body is socially and historically constructed.’8 Useful detailed summaries of the history of body criticism have already been provided, for instance by BERNADETTE WEGENSTEIN.9 It therefore suffices to note that these researchers were particularly interested in the importance assigned to bodies in the processes of forming identity and social relations.

Subsequent studies by feminists such as JUDITH BUTLER and SUSAN BORDO have further ‘challenged understandings of the body as biologically given and fixed, and argued that the human body is both culturally and historically specific […]’10, as MARY EVANS sums up. While BUTLER views bodies in a ‘wholly social’ instead of a ‘wholly natural’ discourse11, in Unbearable Weight BORDO acknowledges that there exists a discourse of the natural, biological body, as well – an idea that implies that a dualistic perspective on the body is (also) possible.12 The benefit of these works lies in that they initiated a growing interest in these subjects across academic disciplines and made it possible to study bodies as semiotic systems of social significance in various sources – such as medieval literature.

It is of course useful to at least initially engage with such fundamental approaches if one seeks to examine bodies in any particular context. However, these studies cannot readily be applied onto a medieval corpus for various reasons. For one, they deal with real, lived bodies and their conclusions are of little importance in relation to bodies in literary texts, and medieval literary texts in particular.13 Furthermore, these studies are primarily concerned with modern phenomena (such as eating disorders), or they examine topics solely from an (often post‐)modern perspective (in the case of body modification). In many cases, they deal explicitly with ‘marked bodies’ or ‘body inscriptions’, that is, with bodies that are consciously altered within a social discourse that the person is part of, and with the person’s consent. Most importantly, bodies in literary texts lack the physical materiality that for so long had clearly placed real, lived bodies in a purely anatomical-physiological discourse. The characters in secular medieval literature also generally (but not always) lack the self-awareness and body-issues of modern subjects. With the exception of grooming, they (generally) do not consciously alter their own bodies to express themselves or their social and/or cultural belonging (or at least this is not narrated in the texts), a practice found in many aboriginal cultures as well as in modern body modification.14

The fundamental differences between bodies in the post-modern world and in medieval texts instigated an awareness of another critical point in body criticism: the nature of the subject. Although, or rather because bodies are familiar to us all, some preliminary remarks as to how they are understood in the following analyses are in order. This is especially important since there is no single definition of the nature of ‘a body’ provided in body criticism. Individual studies have either taken their subject for granted and not engaged with questions of how bodies are constructed, represented and/ or perceived, or they have offered a variety of individual characterisations and classifications. The need to engage with the nature of the subject may have been overlooked in many previous studies because, until recently, ‘the body’ has never been questioned as a concept. Even if placed in a social discourse, it seems to have been presumed that ‘the body’ was somehow ‘naturally’ fixed and pre-given, whether it appeared as a real, physical entity or within literary, legal or theological texts.

One of the most comprehensive monographs about medieval bodies, LE GOFF and TRUONG’S Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge (‘A History of the Body in the Middle Ages’), still employs this view of the tension-loaded but somehow ‘singular’ body. The authors express the opinion that ‘[a]u Moyen Âge, le corps est […] le lieu d’un paradoxe’ and that ‘[l]a conception du corps, sa place dans la société, sa présence dans l’imaginaire et dans la réalité, dans la vie quotidienne et dans les moments exceptionnels ont changé dans toutes les sociétés historiques.’15 LE GOFF and TRUONG plainly acknowledge the various forms in which bodies can appear and hence, by extension, the various bodyconcepts or ideas of bodies (a term explained below) extant in medieval sources. Yet throughout their study they continue to work with the concept of ‘The Body’, a practice grounded perhaps in the perceived stable physical reality of their own (real, lived) bodies.

JEFFREY JEROME COHEN and GAIL WEISS, on the other hand, argue against the use of the capitalised singular: ‘The Body’ to them (as to me) ‘suggests a bounded and autonomous entity, universal but at the same time singular, atemporal, and therefore unmarked by history.’16 In order to foreground the fluid concepts also acknowledged by LE GOFF and TRUONG and to emphasise the various manifestations of bodies in medieval texts, the present study proposes to use the term bodies as a shorthand in the sense of ideas of bodies.17 This stresses that in medieval texts bodies can be variously shaped an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Speak for Yourself! Expressive Mediality and the Self
• 3 I am the Other – Who are You? Expressive Mediality and the Other
• 4 Scratching the Surface: Reading Bodies in Transmissive Mediality
• 5 The Need to Need: Natural Bodily Matters in Mediality Discourse
• 6 Concluding Matters
• 7 List of Abbreviations
• 8 Bibliography
• Index
• Endnotes