White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages 1526145804, 9781526145802

Table of contents :
Front matter
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Operational whiteness
Part I Fragility
Memorialisation in white
Desiring white object
Part II Precarity
Stretched white leather
Flat white
Part III Racialicity
White dorsality
In the lap of whiteness
Conclusion: White environmentality
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

MANCHESTER MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the global Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-​medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific and religious. Titles available in the series 39. The gift of narrative in medieval England Nicholas Perkins 40. Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams Megan G. Leitch 41. Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (eds) 42. The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry Caitlin Flynn 43. Painful pleasures: Sadomasochism in medieval cultures Christopher Vaccaro (ed.) 44. Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds) 45. Medieval literary voices: Embodiment, materiality and performance Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (eds) 46. The heat of Beowulf Daniel C. Remein 47. Hybrid healing Lori Ann Garner 48. Difficult pasts: Post-​Reformation memory and the medieval romance Mimi Ensley 49. The problem of literary value Robert J. Meyer-​Lee 50. Marian maternity in late-​medieval England Mary Beth Long 51. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism Helen Dell

White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages Wan-​Chuan Kao

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Wan-​Chuan Kao 2024 The right of Wan-​Chuan Kao to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book was published with the generous assistance of a Book Subvention Award from the Medieval Academy of America, and a subvention from Washington and Lee University. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manche​ster​univ​ersi​typr​ess.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4580 2 hardback First published 2024 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. David Batchelor, ‘Found Monochrome 430, Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 07.09.10’, 2010. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Glenn D. Burger, Steven F. Kruger and Sylvia Tomasch

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

viii xi

Introduction: Operational whiteness

1

Part I  Fragility 1 Memorialisation in white 2 Desiring white object

49 86

Part II  Precarity 3 Stretched white leather 4 Flat white

131 179

Part III  Racialicity 5 White dorsality 6 In the lap of whiteness

227 305

Conclusion: White environmentality

340

Bibliography Index

386 425

Figures

0.1 Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 78v. (© British Library Board.) 0.2 Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 88r. (© British Library Board.) 1.1 Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum. British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XII, fol. 64r. (© British Library Board.) 1.2 Opicinus de Canistris. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Lat. 6435, fol. 84v–​85r. (© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.) 1.3 Cover of G-Men Detective. March 1943. (Author’s private collection. Photo: Author.) 2.1 The woman clothed with the sun. British Library, MS Harley 4972, fol. 21r. (© British Library Board.) 3.1 ‘Charter of human redemption’. British Library, MS Addit. 37049, fol. 23r. (© British Library Board.) 4.1 Takashi Murakami, 727, 1996. (© 1996 Takashi Murakami/​Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/​New York/​Tokyo.) 4.2 Takashi Murakami, DOB totem pole, 2000. (© 2000 Takashi Murakami/​Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin.) 4.3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas. San Marino, Huntington MS El 26.C.9 (Ellesmere), fol. 152r. (Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)

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55 57 101 154

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List of figures 4.4 Kogepan. (Author’s private collection. Photo: Walter Naegle) 4.5 Kara Walker, African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from ‘A Subtelty, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby’ installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. (Bananas), 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Reproduced by permission of artist. (© Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.) 5.1 Foetus. British Library, MS Sloane 249, fol. 197. (© British Library Board.) 5.2 Detail from the Bible moralisée. British Library, MS Harley 1527, fol. 77r. (© British Library Board.) 5.3 Detail from Fitzwilliam Museum, The Macclesfield Psalter, MS 1–​2005, fol. 140r. (© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.) 5.4 Laura Aguilar, Grounded #111. (© Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.) 5.5 Fire rocks (lapides igniferi). Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 384/​604, fol. 174r. (By permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.) 5.6 Joseph Jastrow, ‘Rabbit and duck optical illusion’, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter. (Public domain.) 5.7 The King of Tars. The National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS. 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), fol. 7r. (By permission.) 6.1 Linh-​Yen Hoang, Wrong Asian, 2019. (© Linh-​Yen Hoang.) 6.2 M. L. Kirk. Colour plate. The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Retold from Chaucer and Others by F. J. Harvey Darton. (Public domain.) 6.3 Dame Elisabeth Frink. The Squire’s Tale, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1972. (The Elisabeth Frink Estate. © 2021. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​DACS, London. Photo © Tate.)

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202 235 235

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List of figures

7.1 Peter Cvjetanovic. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA on 11 August 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/​Anadolu Agency/​Getty Images. By permission.) 7.2 ‘Action Report’, Identity Evropa. (Online. Accessed on 28 April 2018.) 7.3 ‘Southern California Beach Cleanup’, Identity Evropa, 4 December 2017. (Online. Accessed on 28 April 2018.) 7.4 Title page and frontispiece, The Master of Game. (Public domain.)

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Acknowledgements

Portions of the Introduction were published as ‘Race’, in Raluca Radulescu and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (eds), The Routledge Companion to Medieval Literature (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 394–​403; an earlier version of Chapter 1 was published in postmedieval, 4:3 (2013), 352–​63; an earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as ‘Cute Chaucer’ in Exemplaria, 32:2 (2018), 147–​ 71; an earlier version of Chapter 5 was previously published in New Literary History, 52:3/​4 (2021), 535–​61; and portions of the Conclusion were published as ‘Identitarian Politics, Precarious Sovereignty’ in postmedieval, 11:4 (2020), 371–​83; and as ‘The Fragile Giant’ in Arthuriana, 31:2 (2021), 9–​39. This book would not have been possible without the support of many people and institutions. I would like to thank Manchester University Press, especially David Matthews, Anke Bernau, James Paz, Meredith Carroll, Alun Richards, Laura Swift, the anonymous readers, Katie Evans and Rhian Davies. I am grateful for the professionalism of Dawn Preston and Erin Wiegand at Newgen Publishing, Anne Halliday, Robert Holden and Tanya Izzard. I would also like to thank David Batchelor for generously letting me use his photograph as the book cover; Kara Walker and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; Carmen Yam, Takashi Murakami and the staff of Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.; Christopher Velasco and the Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016; the estate of Dame Elisabeth Frink; Linh-​Yen Hoang; and Walter Naegle for image reproduction permissions. I have benefited from the encouragement and advice of the following mentors: Glenn D. Burger, Steven F. Kruger, Sylvia Tomasch, Pamela Sheingorn, Valerie Allen, Michael Sargent, Peter

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Acknowledgements

W. Travis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ruth Evans, Fiona Somerset, Nicole R. Rice, Seeta Chaganti, Holly Crocker, Bruce Holsinger, Kellie Robertson, Geraldine Heng, Jonathan Hsy, Susan Phillips, Jen Boyle, Myra Seaman, Patricia Clare Ingham, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Emily Steiner, Thomas Goodmann, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and Raluca Radulescu. I am grateful for the insights of Arthur Bahr, Anna Kłosowska, Adin Lears, Ayanna Thompson, Urvashi Chakravarty, Susan Signe Morrison, Matthew X. Vernon, Richard Sévère, Mary Rambaran-​ Olm, M. Breann Leake, Micah James Goodrich, Richard H. Godden, Sarah Star, Hillary Cheramie, and colleagues in the Medievalists of Color collective. This project has received generous support from the Folger Institute and the North American Conference on British Studies Fellowship; the Medieval Academy of America Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program; as well as numerous grants from Washington and Lee University: the Lenfest Sabbatical Fellowship, the Summer Lenfest Grants and the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment. I would like to thank Lisa Fagin Davis and the Committee for Professional Development at the Medieval Academy. At Washington and Lee University, I am grateful for the support of the Provost’s office, the Dean of the College, and the English Department. Past and current administrators include Suzanne Keen, Marc Conner, Lena Hill, Paul Youngman, Elizabeth G. Oliver, Chawne Kimber, Fred LaRiviere and Genelle Gertz. Other colleagues include Ed Craun, Deborah Miranda, Lesley Wheeler, Holly Pickett, Edward Adams and Chris Gavaler. I am grateful to the librarians, especially Elizabeth Teaff, Emily Cook, Laura Hewett and Jamie Di Risio. Earlier versions of several chapters were presented and workshopped at several institutions, to whom I am grateful for their invitation and generous feedback: the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University; the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut; the English Program and the Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY; the New Chaucer Society; the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia; the Medieval-​Renaissance Colloquium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; RaceB4Race at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and at

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the Folger Institute; the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Department of English and the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. My personal and professional journey has been a tortuous and complicated one, and I would not be in academia without the kind support of the following advisers: Michelle Abate, Cristina León Alfar, Jennifer N. Brown, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Helen Cooper, Lisa H. Cooper, Isabel Davis, Marilynn Desmond, Lara Farina, Simon Gaunt, Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Ethan Knapp, Shannon McSheffrey, Robert Mills, Alastair Minnis, J. Allan Mitchell, Michael O’Rourke, Tison Pugh, Lee Quinby, Sarah Salih, Eve Salisbury, Christabel Scaife, Stephen Sicari, Dana Stewart, Marion Turner, Kimberly Jew and Amy Wan. I am also grateful for the friendship of Zun Lee, Byron Scarlett, Ross Burningham, Walter Naegle, Eric Ramírez-​ Weaver, the late Ted DeLaney, Sarah Horowitz, Ellen Mayock, Diego Millan, Florinda Ruiz, Taylor Walle, David Bello, Jeanette Barbierie, Yanhong Zhu and Lynny Chin. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Chih-​Hsiou Kao and Mei-​Hui Kao-​Hsueh; and Ronald D. Taylor, for everything.

Introduction: Operational whiteness

And so of white comeþ seuene colours and streccheþ fro þe white toward blak. Also fro blak to white streccheþ seuene. –​John Trevisa, translation of Robert Grosseteste1 What we see as luminous we do not see as grey. But we can certainly see it as white. –​Ludwig Wittgenstein2

What is whiteness? Is it a colour or its absence? Does it mark biological facts or signify immaterial attributes? More crucially, was premodern whiteness strictly or necessarily linked to matters of race? These are the metaphysical uncertainties about the attributes, tactics and functions of medieval whiteness with which the fourteenth-​ century Middle English romance the King of Tars wrestles. It is a story of two theocracies: the legendary Christian kingdom of Tars in the East, and the pseudo-​historical Muslim Damascus in the Levant. The Sultan of Damascus, having heard of the beauty and virtues of the Christian princess of Tars, desires to wed her. When the King of Tars refuses the marriage proposal, the Sultan wages war against Tars and defeats the Christian army. To prevent further bloodshed, the Princess volunteers to marry the Sultan, feigns conversion to Islam and subsequently gives birth to a monstrous, formless lump of flesh. Out of grief, the Sultan blames the Princess for the aberrant birth, while she attributes the monstrosity to his Islamic faith. They agree to appeal to their respective gods to see which religion could bestow human form upon the lump. The Sultan’s prayers to Muslim deities –​the medieval West

2

White before whiteness

misconstrued Islam as polytheistic and idolatrous –​are ineffectual. The Princess then commands a Christian priest to baptise the lump, which transforms into a fair-​faced baby boy. Moved by the sight of the miracle, the Sultan converts to Christianity, and his skin turns from black to white. A new convert, the Sultan demands that all his subjects convert or die. Buttressed by the Christian army of the King of Tars, the Sultan triumphs in his campaign of mass conversions and the genocide of his people. The story of whiteness told here might appear a simple and familiar one: religious and biological discourses in the King of Tars both presuppose and proclaim the normalcy of whiteness, as guaranteed in the white racial body.3 At the centre of the romance is the miracle of the Sultan’s conversion and whitening: ‘His hide that blac and lothely was /​Al white bicom thurth Godes gras /​And clere withouten blame’ (922–​4).4 The whitening of his hideous black skin visibly marks the Sultan’s new social identity as a Christian convert. And the metamorphosis of his material body further registers a shift in his affective potential: in the state of grace, the Sultan’s flesh no longer incites loathing but now inspires ‘joie’ (935). But even in this romance, whiteness is more than a simple dermal phenomenon. The narrative unhinges whiteness from its anchor in the body, sets it adrift and affixes it to nonsomatic surfaces. Earlier in the text, upon her arrival in Damascus, the Princess has a dream in which black hounds, ostensibly signifying Muslims, threaten her safety. Then one of the black hounds either transforms into, or is displaced by, a Christ figure in his ‘manhede, /​In white clothes als a knight’ (447–​8), who reassures her that God will help her in her times of need. As a visual and rhetorical display of identity, the medieval knight is marked not by the whiteness of his skin tone but by that of his garment. Whiteness ceases to be grounded in the body and instead becomes attached to inanimate objects. Whiteness may inaugurate and authorise a sense of identity; but as Susan Crane notes, ‘clothing, not skin, is the frontier of the self’.5 There is, in fact, a material loosening and a conceptual unmooring of whiteness from any stable essence or singular significance within the premodern milieu. If Aristotelian hylomorphism –​a key concept in medieval scholastic philosophy –​posits an inextricable

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Introduction

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joining of metaphysical form and physical matter, how do we read the slippage of whiteness from skin to armour? We see this more clearly in another fourteenth-​ century text, Mandeville’s Travels, in which the image of a knight clad in white is pivotal to the West’s perception and representation of the Tartars. In a chapter on the history of Genghis Khan, Mandeville’s Travels depicts how as the Great Khan lay in bed one night, ‘he sawgh in a visioun þat þere cam before [him] a knyght Armed all in white and he satt vpon a white hors’, a knight who foretold of the Mongols’ global empire.6 The account is based on a French text by the Cilician Armenian Hetoum (Hayton of Corycus), itself allegedly drawn from a native source, the Secret History of Mongols. In the Eastern original, a shaman rode a horse into the skies to talk with the spirits and uttered the prophecy. Hetoum, in his rendition of the legend, displaces the shaman with ‘a knyght in armour vpon a white horse’ who appeared in a dream vision.7 By the time of Mandeville’s Travels, the knight is emphatically imaged as ‘Armed all in white’.8 More so than the case of the King of Tars, the process of whitening that occurs here takes place at the level of the social and the affective rather than the simply biological. Whiteness, as figured in the Mandeville-​author’s account of Genghis Khan’s two dreams, is not primarily concerned with dermal pigmentation or signs of religious conversion. Rather, in the substitution of a tribal shaman with a white knight on a white horse, whiteness becomes a fetish of European chivalric masculinity, an ideal that presents itself as ostensibly normative and universal. In fact, whiteness enfolds the material fetish of the armoured male body on a horse within the broader socio-​historical context of the encounter between East and West: a seemingly imminent conquest of Christendom by the Tartars. Contemporary critical whiteness studies often construct whiteness as ‘a distinct and relatively recent historical fiction’.9 Because whiteness studies grew out of critical race theory, it remains heavily invested in whiteness as a dermal phenomenon and as a racial marker. For instance, Theodore W. Allen argues that the ‘white race’ was invented in the seventeenth century as a social control to maintain an economic system of bonded servitude.10 But in linking the emergence of whiteness to modernity, Allen constructs a

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White before whiteness

historical teleology in which the Middle Ages implicitly functions as the precursor to some real birth of modern whiteness. Anthologies, such as Critical Whiteness Studies, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and Whiteness: A Critical Reader, as well as individual studies, such as Richard Dyer’s White and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, have limited whiteness studies temporally to (post-​)modernity and spatially to the West.11 Premodern whiteness, whether addressed or not in these works, is denied the conceptual space to exist. Since the 1990s, medieval studies, through the intervention of postcolonial theory, has actively examined medieval constructions of the Other vis-​ à-​ vis Western Christendom. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages and the special ‘race’ issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2001, for example, have exposed the processes of differentiation and identity formation that engage with overtly locatable and visible others such as Jews, Muslims or imaginary monstrous races on the edge of the world.12 Yet scholarship has continued to revolve around critical deployments of terms like ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. Disciplinary divides –​primarily those between historians and literary scholars –​have informed the critical conversation in medieval studies over designations of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, as well as their (mis)alignments with biology and culture.13 Whereas William Chester Jordan eschews ‘race’ in favour of ‘ethnicity’ in medieval studies, Thomas Hahn, taking a different view, suggests that medieval representations of colours are never innocent or neutral but constitutive of ‘racial’ differences that seek to universalise Western values.14 Robert Bartlett, in The Making of Europe, points to the classification system of the ninth-​ century Benedictine canonist Regino of Prüm as the basis for medieval racial ideology, one that categorises humans according to descent, customs, language and law.15 Bartlett contends that descent resembles modern forms of biological racism, which was insignificant in the Middle Ages. In contrast, customs, language and law are malleable cultural phenomena that function as ‘the primary badges of ethnicity’ rather than of race.16 For Bartlett, a culturally based concept of ethnicity is a more appropriate critical lens for the Middle Ages. But, as Ania Loomba argues, culture and biology are mutually constitutive.17

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Introduction

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Other scholars have made further important interventions by arguing for the interpellations of medieval ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ through other categorical differences such as medieval ‘nationalism’, religion, body, sexuality, gender, class and other cross-​ cultural and cross-​ spatial encounters.18 Here, I cite three early twenty-​ first-​century approaches in the humanities that recognise race as a crucial area of critical engagement for medieval studies: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng and Cord Whitaker.19 All three reject the assumption that ethnicity denotes malleable culture, and race, intractable biology. Cohen, extending his work on medieval identity constructions and the postcolonial Middle Ages, approaches medieval race with Deleuzian lyricism and rigour. Race is a cultural fantasy, a sorting system, and an embodied performance; racialised bodies are always becoming ‘something else, something unexpected’.20 Heng’s magnum opus, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, is a wide-​ranging comparativist cultural history. Resisting modernity’s teleological violence, Heng proposes a Foucauldian analytics of race as ‘a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences’ that exists in multiple and ‘varied locations and concretions’.21 And Whitaker’s Black Metaphors deploys a methodology grounded in literary studies, visual culture, linguistics and Black Studies. For Whitaker, ‘race is a matter of language and literature at least as much as, if not more than, it is a matter of the visual’; racism, he poignantly notes, is an ‘interpretive process’ with real-​world consequences.22 Such studies, though crucial to medieval studies of race, have treated whiteness primarily as a monolithic sameness defined against the Other and as a strictly corporeal signifier –​whether indicative of spiritual, sexual or economic status. The dearth of whiteness critique in medieval studies that engages both somatic and nonsomatic figurations of whiteness leaves unchallenged the assumed clarity and knowledge of what whiteness is and means. And the risks of not critically engaging whiteness, as Ruth Frankenberg contends, include ‘a continued failure to displace the “unmarked marker” status of whiteness’ and a perpetuation of ‘a kind of asymmetry that has marred even many critical analyses’.23 More importantly, medieval studies’ engagements with whiteness, thus far, have largely replicated and left intact contemporary whiteness studies’

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White before whiteness

emphases on whiteness as primarily a phenomenon of skin colour and racialisation.24 While there was no single, unequivocal system of medieval colour theory, Aristotelian philosophy was foundational in colour treatises in the Middle Ages. Colour, for Aristotle, is an inherent property of the elemental material world as manifest in humours and revealed by light. In De proprietatibus rerum, for instance, the thirteenth-​ century scholastic Bartholomaeus Anglicus defines whiteness as ‘the ground of all colours’, a product of the brightness of light and the pureness of clear matter.25 White appears in things either cold and moist or hot and dry. He further uses bodily complexions to explain both the causation of dreams and the formation of skin tones in humans; phlegm brings dreams of white snow and rain, and the colder climate of the north engenders white skin. Bartholomaeus suggests, in John Trevisa’s fourteenth-​century translation: [T]‌ he sonne abideth longe over the Affers, men of Affrica, and brennen and wasten humours and maken ham short of body, black of face, with crispe here. And for her spirites passe oute atte pores that ben open, so they be more cowardes of herte. An the cuntrarye is of men of the northe londe: for coldenes that is withuote stoppeth the pores and breedeth humours of the bodye maketh men more ful and huge; and coolde that is modir of whitnesse maketh hem more white in face and in skynne, and vapoures and spirites ben ysmyten inwarde and maken hatter withinne and so the more bolde and hardy. An the men of Asia ben meneliche disposed in that, and here firste londe is by eeste.26

The linkage between colour and medieval race is complex and volatile. Dark skin, for instance, is associated with the lower classes. In the Old French Roman de Silence, the cross-​dressing Silence darkens her skin in order to pass as a male labourer.27 Epidermal blackness also marks religious difference. In the Middle English romance the King of Tars, Muslims are depicted as ‘blo and blac’ (1220). However, there is no consistent, immutable correlation between colour and premodern race. Positive portrayals of blackness did exist in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely made possible by the dark-​ skinned individuals’ possession of Christian virtues and/​or chivalric prowess. The statue of a black St. Maurice with African features at

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Introduction

7

Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany was erected c. 1220–​50.28 In the Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Moriaen, the eponymous hero is a black Christian knight. The poem asks rhetorically of the significance of Moriaen’s skin tone: ‘Though he was black, what harm was it?’29 Yet despite the variations in colour symbolism, there was a trajectory towards a hardening of the black–​white binary. Medieval humoural and colour theories dovetailed with a chromatic shift in European visual traditions that can be traced to the Crusades and the increased contacts among European Christians, Muslims and sub-​Saharan Africans. As art historian Madeline Caviness (2008) argues, the high and late Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of a historically contingent ‘white identity’ in visual representations of Europeans, whose flesh tone shifted from a pinkish-​brown to pasty white.30 The lighter complexion used to portray European women, developed at the end of the twelfth century, was extended to signify all Europeans by the 1350s. By the fourteenth century, devils were coloured whereas Christ and the saints had bodies of pure white that glowed like the Eucharistic wafer. But if humoural theory presumes a direct correspondence between external physical attributes and internal humoural conditions, the precise meanings of bodily colours are anything but stable. Whereas Bartholomaeus sees white skin as a sign of a ‘bold and hardy’ temperament, the medieval Arab scholar Al-​Mas’udi associates it with a dull wit and gross nature. Colour may reveal the essence of a person or thing, yet true difficulty lies in proper interpretation. This book contends that there is, in fact, a definitional slipperiness to whiteness as it is manifest within the complexity of the medieval social world and literary imagination: in the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight, whiteness points to an objectified fetish; in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, ‘White’ functions as both the proper name of a lady and a descriptor of her courtly body; in Pearl, whiteness marks a precious jewel and the divine Lamb of God; in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, whiteness operates as an aesthetic deformational force that inflicts violence on whiteness; in Langland’s Piers Plowman and late medieval Passion drama, whiteness names a theatrical leather skin-​suit that signifies the suffering body of Christ; in the King of Tars, whiteness is a technology of racial recognition that paradoxically resists the absolute cleavage of life and nonlife;

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White before whiteness

and in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, whiteness operates as a magical hold that racialises the body and periodises history via empathy. Across a diverse range of texts, whiteness navigates the divide between the immaterial and the material, the abstract and the concrete, the spiritual and the bodily. Premodern whiteness therefore functions as a ‘systemic edge’, a term I borrow from Saskia Sassen, who argues that late twentieth-​century global political economy is dominated by the logic of expulsion. For Sassen, ‘the systemic edge is the site where general conditions take extreme forms precisely because it is the site for expulsion or incorporation’.31 What the extreme forms bring into relief is the presence of deeply embedded structural trends within the system that would otherwise remain undetectable. I contend that premodern whiteness brings into relief the extreme forms of ideologies and discursive praxes. For example, in the King of Tars, when the lump of flesh transforms into a fair-​skinned boy after baptism, or when the Sultan’s skin whitens after his conversion, whiteness appears to function as incontrovertible somatic proof of racial and religious identity that grants entry into medieval Latin Christendom. The transitions between acute forms of flesh and body determine the expulsion from or incorporation into the body politic. In this instance, the systemic edge is the site of the technologisation of flesh and body, operating through the confluence of race and religion. Socio-​ cultural categories and praxes, such as whiteness, defy easy systemisation; there is a complex range of attitudes in representations of whiteness in medieval texts. In my study, I adapt A. J. Greimas’ understanding of cultural values as modalities rather than absolutes.32 If culture is best understood as a symbol-​system, cultural modalities require the semiotic power of symbols in order to operate. Whiteness is precisely a figuration that attempts to facilitate the cohesion and function of various medieval modalities. In other words, whiteness is a set of strategies and power formations –​ though not the only one –​that pervades the grounds of late medieval socio-​cultural life. As discourse, premodern whiteness makes possible multiple ideological regimes along the spectrum of the material and the immaterial. Whiteness as a representational trope makes tangible cultural ideals such as courtly beauty, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, social ethics or European identity. At the

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Introduction

9

same time, it marks the limits of ruling ideologies by registering specific tension and breakage within the values it signifies. The critical question driving this study is not necessarily ‘What is premodern whiteness?’ but ‘What things are recognised or misrecognised as “white” in late medieval sociality and thought?’ A key to understanding the ideological lability of premodern whiteness, I contend, is the lively critical conversation in trans* studies today. As Jack Halberstam points out, ‘trans*’ with the asterisk underscores both the non-​hegemonic condition and a complex set of identities that cannot be rendered adequately by the delimiting use of ‘trans’ meaning strictly a complete transition from one essentialised sex to another, a symptom of the insufficiency of the binary classificatory system of gender. The asterisk is a diacritical mark that ‘poses a question to its prefix and stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming and recognition’.33 Along with Avery Tompkins and Reese Simpkins, Halberstam affirms the inclusive, liberatory potential of the asterisk, which opens the term ‘trans’ up to a broad set of conditions of signification and possibilities of embodiment in flux.34 The asterisk signals the wildcard function in data research, draws attention to the term in front of it and pushes beyond the prefix.35 On the theoretical capaciousness of the asterisk in trans* studies, Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein speculate that ‘[T]‌rans* foregrounds and intensifies the prehensile, prefixial nature of trans-​and implies a suffixial space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (though never any one object in particular)’.36 The asterisk functions as a splitter and a joiner, an amplifier and a placeholder, revealing both the polyvalence of signification and the work of attachment. Like the fingery starfish, it is haptic and indexical, touching and pointing.37 What if we conceived of whiteness as possessing an equally powerful yet invisible asterisk? That is, ‘white–​’ stands before ‘–​ ness’, shifting from the secure position of a root to a sort of prehensile, prefixial space. Therefore, the before of white*ness signals not only the temporal antecedence of premodernity but also the complex signifying power of ‘white*’ that is distinct yet inseparable from the work of ideological attachment to it. However, white* is not quite analogous to trans*. Whereas ‘trans*’ with the asterisk

10

White before whiteness

underscores the non/​ anti-​ hegemonic condition and the wide-​ ranging spectrum of gender corporealisations in transness, ‘white’ without the asterisk already starts out from a hegemonic position that ‘trans’ or ‘trans*’ can never occupy. As a result, ‘white*’ with the asterisk signals an originary hegemonic privilege more actively than ‘trans*’ could ever do. But despite the differences between trans* and white*, the operations of the asterisk have similar effects on both. Halberstam observes that the asterisk in trans* demands us ‘to think in new and different ways about what it means to claim a body’.38 Likewise, I contend that ‘white*’ asks us to reconsider what it means to claim whiteness and the ramifications of that possession. The asterisk resists the delimiting deployment of white* in premodernity and renders whiteness in both non-​racialising and racialising ways without defaulting to the human, the somatic or the animate. White* indexes the noncoincidence of ‘white’ with any singular formation of power and, like trans*, registers the broad sense and the capacious constellation of subjectivities enfolded within premodern whiteness. In the rest of the Introduction and the book, my typographical renderings of ‘white*’ and ‘white*ness’ will be sparse and tactful. This is not to re-​erase and re-​repress the asterisk, or to re-​inscribe the default hegemony of whiteness. But since white* does not yet have actual usage like trans*, I have opted not to make visible the asterisk in most instances in order to ease the process of reading and to avoid becoming heavy-​ handed, self-​ indulgent or over-​ stylised. White* appears strategically, when it is crucial to foreground the effects of the asterisk in the workings of premodern whiteness. Throughout, we must continue to be cognisant of the diacritical mark, which is invisible but not absent. While ‘white’ without the asterisk may function as a dermal signifier, white* is inclusive of the somatic but also reaches beyond the biological or the racial. This is especially important in premodern contexts, where white*ness more aptly describes the capacious, heterogenous and multiple operations of white*, in contrast to the delimiting, homogenising and singularising sense of whiteness in modernity. Mike Hill, assessing the workings of contemporary white supremacist movements, argues that their racial logic is ‘a sort of psycho-​ temporal fantasy … part nostalgia and part prophecy’.39 The

11

Introduction

11

complex temporal manoeuvres involve simultaneously an imagined move into the past of white purity and an equally fantastical move into the future of post-​whiteness racial extinction, both subtended by a self-​fashioned perception of whiteness’s ‘thoroughly agitated status in the present’.40 In this analysis, the logic of the hidden asterisk of white*ness may appear to make possible the ideological attachments of modern racism to all sorts of imagined temporalities and worlds, thereby converting white* into whiteness. But the opposite takes place. By reasserting the presumed hegemonic position of whiteness and restricting whiteness to signifying race alone, white supremacists, along with their vision of the medieval past, eradicate the asterisk and its anti-​hegemonic, liberatory capacity. In effect, ‘white*’ reverts to ‘white’. The racist medievalism of white supremacist fantasy remains stuck in modernity. Whiteness is not a thing but an operation. Resisting a reductive, technical understanding of the operation strictly in terms of its causal or effectual attributes, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson emphasise instead the operation’s processual nature and dynamics. Neither work nor labour, the operation is an interval ‘that separates the operation’s trigger from its outcome. Within this interval, the operation acquires an uneven and broken patterning of opening and closure that is constitutive of its unfolding’.41 What the interval offers is a freeze-​frame, a cross-​sectional view of the types of ‘social activities, technical codes, and devices that make an operation possible’.42 Another crucial feature of the operation is the fact that while an operation is oriented towards an outcome, the end goal is not necessarily the production of ‘ “a work”, a material “thing” ’.43 Rather, an operation, such as the operation of capital, is concerned primarily with the production of ‘connections, chains and networks’, or, in Mezzadra and Neilson’s terms, with the ‘fabrication of the world’.44 Operations create linkages, and these social relations shape the world. The asterisk marks the systemic edge within ‘white*ness’, but it is also an operation linking the colour white to discursive apparatuses that fabricate ideological regimes. Mezzadra and Neilson’s notion of the operation as the fabrication of relationality and world systems resonates with the Middle English term operacioun, which denotes not only ‘work’ but also ‘something made or created’, ‘structure’, ‘the function of an element’ and

12

White before whiteness

‘that which it does or is designed to do’.45 Whiteness is an operation precisely in the sense of its capacity to generate structures and connections that shape bodies and lives. In De colore, Robert Grosseteste conceives of the scale of colours as composed of whiteness and blackness, two extreme colours, situated at opposing ‘corners’ out of which seven colours descend from whiteness, and seven colours ascend from blackness: ‘Similiter septem erunt proximi nigredini, quibus a nigredine uersus albedinem ascenditur, donec fiat occursus aliorum colorum septem, quibus ab albedine descenditur’.46 Trevisa, in his translation of De colore as found in Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum, replaces the vector-​like Latin terms ascenditur and descenditur with the scalar-​ like Middle English verb strecchen: ‘And so of white comeþ seuene colours and streccheþ fro þe white towards blak. Also fro blak to white streccheþ seuene’.47 Trevisa’s word choice deemphasises the hierarchical conception of colours and shifts the understanding of the colour scale towards one that emphasises its continuity, range and compass.48 In other words, stretching is an operation of colour either towards or away from whiteness or blackness. The stretching of whiteness is intervallic and cross-​sectional. The Middle English strecchen activates the affective and sensorial in ways that the Latin terms do not. And the move away from directional hierarchy (almost Cartesian before Descartes) reimagines a different conception of the physical world and humanity’s relationship to it –​one that is supported by a nonvertical grounding and is more agential and more affective. Importantly, whiteness as an operative strecchen shifts analyses of whiteness away from reductive opposition to operational difference. The critical task is not to sort cultural artefacts and praxes into restrictive bins of white-​versus-​black binarism but to track and examine the operations that generate differences in relation to whiteness. Consider the earlier example of the Great Khan’s dreams of a white knight on a white horse in Mandeville’s Travels. For medieval Mongols, whiteness symbolised both good fortune (e.g. the White Festival that Marco Polo (1254–​1324) observes) and political charisma (e.g. Genghis Khan’s white standard banners).49 Nor is the whiteness of the shaman and his horse absent in the original Eastern legend. The episode might have a parallel or origin in

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Introduction

13

Uighur mythology. Thomas Allsen cites a medieval Uighur legend in which a ruler, Buqu Khan, ‘had a dream in which he saw an elderly man dressed in a white robe and carrying a white staff who informs him of his forthcoming political success. Later, his chief adviser has the same dream and Buqu Khan, confident of his good fortune, launches his campaigns of conquest’.50 When Genghis Khan addresses the shaman Teb Tenggri’s successor, he proclaims that the new beki (chief) ‘shall wear a white dress /​And ride a white gelding. /​He shall sit on a high seat /​And be waited upon’.51 Teb Tenggri might have worn a white robe when he spoke to the heavenly spirits.52 But for medieval Europeans, more is at work here than political fortune and charisma. The operational difference between East and West lies not only in the cultural significance and customs attached to the colour white but also in what whiteness operationalises within each tradition. As the legend migrated west, the tribal shaman riding on a horse was transformed into a knight dressed in white riding a white horse, an image linked to the iconography and legends of Saint George.53 In the westward transmission of the Mongols’ origin story, what whiteness operationalises is the shaping of the West’s reception of the Mongols by medieval Christianity, chivalry and praxes of historiography. For the West, it is whiteness, not Mongol shamanism or political prowess, that authorises Mongol imperialism. Note that, in this instance, whiteness stops at the horse and armour; they are the thresholds of whiteness. Neither the Great Khan nor the knight has white skin. If, as Richard H. Godden argues, technologies of chivalry can be understood as prostheses that both complete the chivalric body and expose its vulnerability, then the white armour and the white horse constitute the prostheses of premodern racialisation.54 Nonhuman animals and things, not skin tone or religious conversion per se, are equally important animating figures of whiteness and therefore of race. The face of the shaman-​knight in the Great Khan’s dreams is a blank space of negative whiteness. The logic of metonymy (armour and horse) aligns with allegory and invites modes of reading that are fundamentally symbolic. Whiteness, or white*, becomes the systemic edge between the West and Mongol imperium. We see a similar operation of whiteness within representation traditions of medieval Mongols in the visual arts. On folio 78v of

14

White before whiteness

British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., which contains Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde [Travels], the Mongols are portrayed as barefooted, dark-​skinned and turbaned Muslim idolaters. But on folio 88 of the same manuscript is an image of the Great Khan and three other Tartars all depicted as white Europeans with blonde hair, in Western attire and engaged in a pleasant dinner conversation at a table covered in food, drink and utensils. Medieval Mongols, of course, do not look or dress like dark-​ skinned Muslims or pale-​skinned Europeans. But the Great Khan’s political prowess, imperial wealth and receptivity to Christianity align him with European courtly ideals, which in turn operationalise whiteness as the defining figuration of his court in the visual programme. Whiteness here slips out of its traditional secure location within Europe and becomes a labile and wandering signifier. The operational difference hinges not on somatic markers of race but on religious practices, political powers and court etiquettes.55 A commitment to investigating the operational differences of premodern whiteness guides this study, which aims to put pressure on whiteness in the late Middle Ages. I consider three operations of whiteness through the theoretical frames of fragility, precarity and racialicity. Decoupling the prefix-​like ‘white*’ from the suffix ‘-​ness’, this book argues firstly that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone; secondly, that the ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing both an originary essence and a logical teleology, is less a retro-​futuristic temporisation –​one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward –​than a discursive figuration of how white* becomes whiteness; and thirdly, that premodern whiteness is fragile, precarious and racialistic. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-​defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment.

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Introduction

15

Figure 0.1  Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 78v. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Fragility Part I of the book enfolds two studies under the operation of ‘fragility’ and asks what white fragility looks like in the late Middle Ages. As a concept, white fragility originates in contemporary antiracist discourse. According to Robin DiAngelo, white fragility is ‘a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves’.56 Some of the defensive counter-​ moves include confusion, indignation, refusal

16

White before whiteness

Figure 0.2  Marco Polo’s Travels. British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I., fol. 88r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

to continue engagement, penalisation, retaliation, isolation and ostracisation. DiAngelo’s theory of white fragility is productive in my thinking through the volatile complexities of late medieval identity formation as a response to affective, cognitive and social triggers that are not exclusively racial in nature. Identity is a reactive collective-​and/​or self-​fashioning, fragilely formed under the duress of loss and grief, and under the polarised pulls of the universalising and particularising impulses of whiteness. The specific affects of white fragility that I examine here are the interrelated emotional states of mourning and desiring. Mourning and desire, as forms of affective labour, are also a labour of memory. In ancient and medieval theories of memory, ‘white’ (albus) is an exemplary image within the Aristotelian chain of mnemonic association. Aristotle states that, in the act of recollection, ‘people go quickly from one thing to another, for example, from milk to white, from white to air, and from this to fluid’.57 This associational nature of whiteness, as conceived by ancient and medieval thinkers, is useful in analysing whiteness as a trope that sets in motion, provides the nexuses for and actualises modes of cultural values. In addition

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to its function as a signifying image in theories of memory, albus is also a term used by ancient and medieval philosophers to discuss the nature of language and of signification. Peter Travis has noted the prevalence of the trope of ‘white’ in late medieval philosophy and its connections to vernacular literature. Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, speculates about the nature of signification in the following dialogue between a master and his student: M. Si est in domo aliqua albus equus te nesciente inclusus, et aliquis tibi dicit: in hac domo est album sive albus, an scis per hoc ibi esse equum? D. Non. Sive enim dicat album albedinem, sive in quo est albedo, nullius certae rei mente concipio essentiam nisi huius coloris.58 [Master: Suppose that, unknown to you, a white horse were enclosed in some building or other, and someone told you, ‘A white is in this building’ –​would that inform you that the horse was inside? Student: No; for whether he speaks of a white, or of whiteness, or of that within which the whiteness is enclosed, no definite circumstance is brought to my mind apart from the essence of this colour.]59

As a paronym and not a proper name, albus (white) is not necessary a predication of any ‘thing’ in particular; that is, it ‘fail[s]‌to name the being, or essence, of any subject’.60 Anselm points out that the statement, ‘A white is in this building [in hac domo est album]’ is insufficient in itself to identify precisely what the ‘white thing [album]’ is.61 White*ness, as conceived in one medieval philosophical tradition, marks the equivocal and unfixed distance between the signifier and the signified, or, in Derrida’s term, différance. Whiteness is an unreliable trigger of desire and memory; as such, its fashioning of identity is tenuous and fragile. Like identity, memory too is suspect and fraught. Though white functions as an affective catalyst or an imagistic link within the mnemonic chain, the memory produced by whiteness is at best partially fictive and always incomplete. Consider the following scenario: a man, having lost his beloved lady, is urged by another man to describe the deceased’s beauty. The mourner obliges and enumerates the ravishing whiteness of the beloved’s body, one body

18

White before whiteness

part at a time. Or consider a slightly different scenario: a man, having lost a precious object (a person? a thing?), endlessly recalls to himself its/​her dazzling white lustre. But when he is finally face to face with the lost object, he becomes confused by the splendid whiteness he sees before him and is uncertain if this embodied ‘thing’ is the very object that he has lost. Now consider a cognitive experiment conducted in the first decade of the twentieth century, in which a researcher asked a subject to match the blue of a certain friend’s eyes, the black of his hat, the red of his lips or the colour of a brick, with colour patches available in the laboratory. The results? The subject always picked colour samples that were too deep, too bright or too saturated when compared to the original colours. There was not a single exact match, only a series of mismatches. The first two scenarios describe what takes place in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and in the anonymous Pearl, respectively. The twentieth-​century experiment was the work of the German psychologist David Katz. Despite the obvious disparities between the two fictional scenes and the scientific investigation, temporal and social gaps notwithstanding, I deliberately yoke them together and argue for a critical affinity among them. What all three scenes share is an interest in colour, memory, language and affect. More importantly, they are about colour perception. It is a scientific truism that colour perception is a deceptively simple but complex process, influenced by variations in illumination and differences in material surface (texture). Hence, strength of saturation and degree of brightness are often associated with colour attributions, like ‘bright yellow’ or ‘deep red’. As Brian Massumi observes, colour is inseparable from illumination, and the perception of colour is ‘always a fusion of colour and degree of brightness’.62 In Latin, candidus and albus both denote the colour white; yet whereas candor suggests a dazzling whiteness, album is whiteness without lustre. In the play of colour, affect and memory, the key question is not what the fragile subject is doing with colour. As Massumi contends, the critical question is ‘what is color doing to the subject’.63 Triggering does not fully describe what the colour white is really doing to affect or memory. Rather, as Katz would describe it, colour is ‘striking’ the subjective affect and memory; Katz attributes the

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Introduction

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imprinting of objects’ colours in memory and the subsequent cognitive exaggeration of the same colours in recollection to ‘the absolute striking character of these colour peculiarities’.64 Whiteness is similarly marked by an absolute striking character, which results in a psychic and bodily overreaction of the fragile subject. Katz theorises that ‘the absolute strikingness of the whiteness, blackness or hue of certain objects may have led to an exaggeration of these colour-​attributes in memory’.65 It is as if the subject’s body, having been wounded by colour in the act of perception, experiences a trauma-​like state in which the imprinting of sensory impressions becomes inordinately amplified. Affective attachment to particular objects may also lead to a cognitive exaggeration on the part of the subject. Affect is therefore both a modulation of and an interference with the formation of colour memory. The exaggeration of memory and the overreaction of the subject are symptomatic reactions of white fragility. Projecting vulnerability, fragility, in all its absolute striking character, is in fact a violent formation of white subjectivity and identity. In gesturing towards Katz and Massumi, I contend that the imbrications of figurative whiteness with the grounds of late medieval cultural psyche often exhibit a similarly precarious co-​functioning of colour, affect and memory. On the affective register, mourning as a self-​reflexive affective labour is uncannily like the matching of colours real and remembered. In other words, mourning is a recollecting of the lost object, in which the object remembered is always already in excess of the object lost. The Dreamer in Pearl is obsessively trying to match up and beyond the Maiden’s whiteness with that of his lost object (a pearl? a daughter?). And the Man in Black attempts to match the White he lost with the White that he remembers and recounts to the Chaucerian narrator in the Book of the Duchess. Mourning, then, is an exaggeration of desire; or, in the context of the Middle Ages, the absolute strikingness of desire is precisely what drives courtly love. Chapter 1, ‘Memorialisation in white’, adopts the Middle English defaute as a theory and a methodology and argues that the Book of the Duchess exhibits two distinct modes of whiteness refracted through space and time. The first is a normative and recognisable whiteness produced by the linkage of the courtly lady ‘White’ and

20

White before whiteness

the male subject, whose masculine chivalric identity is superior and pure. This form of whiteness makes possible a productive erasure of local and individual difference through a deliberate evocation of an international, universalising courtliness emblematised in French courtly literature. It is a whiteness that occupies the then and there. The second is a particularising and literalising mode of whiteness that is emphatically ‘English’ –​the here and now. The newer if not more ‘modern’ form of whiteness being developed in the Book of the Duchess needs to localise and particularise the universals: the poem opens with the generic courtly Lady named White but ends on a white castle on a rich hill that alludes to John of Gaunt and his deceased wife Blanche. It is a whiteness that acknowledges its own limits or borders, be they linguistic, cultural or proto-​national. The naming and mapping of the lady White appears to feed into the structuring of a universal and ideologically secure voice and identity coded as white*, masculine and aristocratic. Yet the Dreamer’s literalising and Englishing mode of questioning the Man in Black interrupts the normal unfolding of consolation and insists on the local and the particular, for they are the specific tags of memories that shape subjectivity. The two male writing selves, practitioners of white fragility as a reactionary politics, present whiteness as embodying both the universalising and the particularising modes of aristocratic self-​fashioning. Because courtly love is a tautological love of the courtly, and because fragility undergirds courtliness, the Chaucerian ‘I’ is what I would term a ‘white fragiliac’, the masculine subject in mourning who must write his way out of whiteness as an extreme state of paralysis and death. In Chapter 2, ‘Desiring white object’, I examine the blurring of the deceased body of the Pearl Maiden and the material pearl as an object. Resisting reading the Maiden solely in terms of religious and psychic metaphors, I argue that the material status of the perle is key to understanding the poem’s engagement with socio-​economic changes in the late Middle Ages. Whiteness, as materialised in the Maiden’s body and clothes, signifies not only the divine purity and virginity of the Maiden, but also, in its mixing of costly materiality and moral purity, the emerging spirituality of the urban middling classes, exemplified in the figure of the Dreamer–​Jeweller. I then draw on the psychoanalytic works of Lacan and Žižek to examine

12

Introduction

21

the play of distance between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden. The Maiden, in her function as the Lady–​Object, or the Lacanian object a, simultaneously attracts the Dreamer and keeps him at a distance across the stream. But if distance is crucial to the poem’s affective labour of mourning, then whiteness complicates desire’s play of proximity. Like the shimmering whiteness of the Pearl Maiden, consolation is offered yet denied to the Dreamer. Kept at a distance, the Dreamer is doomed to encircle endlessly not only the Maiden but the Lamb of God at the heart of the New Jerusalem, whose whiteness is marred by a bleeding wound at its centre: a sign of the Dreamer’s trauma and of the woundedness of desire itself. I further examine the poem’s deliberate silence over the physical whitening of pearls, which are almost never naturally white when harvested. As a literal and figurative object filled with affect, the Maiden embodies the object’s concealment of its history of labour. Pearl’s whiteness, therefore, is both a marker of human artifice and an erasure of its history of production. And this temporal erasure precipitates in the Dreamer’s inability to move beyond mourning. Finally, I argue that white fragilisation is the process by which the normativity of whiteness congeals into cultural praxes.

Precarity Whereas Part I investigates medieval whiteness as a signifier of individual loss, fragility and mourning, Part II turns towards whiteness as an operative marker of precarity of the body politic, as well as of its imbrications with materiality, aesthetics and religion. Medieval manifestations of whiteness almost always involve object relations, for whiteness is frequently experienced primarily as the colour of certain material objects. Steven Connor has noted the human tendency to identify colours with the particular objects they characterise. In the process, colour ‘moves from being a synecdoche or associated feature of the object to becoming the object’s name’.66 Ludwig Wittgenstein likewise observes that when asked what particular colour words mean, people immediately point to things that have these colours.67 Anselm of Canterbury, in a hypothetical dialogue between a master and his student on signs and signification, observes that the word album brings to mind a material body or

22

White before whiteness

surface, however indefinite it may be: ‘Nam etsi occurat animo corpus aut superficies, quod non ob aliud fit nisi quia expertus sum in his solere esse albedinem’ [True, that name brings to mind a body or a surface, but this is simply because my experience has shown me that whiteness is usually found in such things].68 The association between whiteness and ‘such things’ (his) is a product of experience, Anselm suggests. Such an experience further gestures towards the intersection of whiteness and materiality in medieval culture, one in which the reality of premodern hygiene was largely responsible for the physical fragility of whiteness, that is, the difficulty of achieving and maintaining whiteness in any material object. The purity of whiteness, in other words, is always precarious. As Katz and Massumi point out, colour matching is first and foremost a cognitive activity grounded in an intimate engagement with everyday objects; these are the things that develop memory colours for individuals who can claim possession of or have close contact with them.69 When Anselm observes that it is experience which leads one to associate mentally the idea of a white thing (album) with a body or a surface (corpus aut superficies), he means that it is the work of colour memories that establishes such a link between whiteness and ‘such things’ (his) in the first place. Beyond purely cognitive and philosophical registers, the physical whitening of objects in the Middle Ages is itself a form of colour matching. More often than not, the colour white marks an object as precious, be it a garment or a jewel. For instance, pearl, from which the Middle English poem takes its name, is the cynosure whose whiteness designates not only spiritual purity but also the social status of the pearl’s owner. Yet what is neglected in valuations of white as a colour is the fact that whiteness, as found in many material objects, is something that is often artificially produced. Most pearls are not naturally white but whitened through labour-​intensive processes. The artificial whitening of most pearls is deemed an improvement upon –​really, an exaggeration of –​their natural colours, which are valuated as flawed, lacklustre and unattractive. It is incumbent upon an artificer to match the colour of the pearl with its ideal. Whiteness as a thing is a product of a history of material labour; its ‘thingness’ bespeaks an object biography. At the same time, whiteness as a thing also figures an erasure of its history of

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Introduction

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labour and production. The Dreamer–​Narrator of Pearl, in spite of his effusive extolling of the pearl’s ravishing whiteness, speaks not a single word on the messiness, or even the pain, of labour that produces the whiteness he so desires. Psychologist Marc H. Bornstein calls the inseparability of colour and illumination the ‘brightness confound’, a phenomenon that thwarted his attempts to understand certain anomalies of vision in infants.70 In this book, I would like to suggest a similar, though figurative, confoundedness attached to whiteness as manifest in particular late medieval moments. The whit lether body-​suit worn by actors playing Christ in medieval Passion dramas, for example, is never the colour white as one might know it today. It is a colour word that exceeds the material nature of the skin; whit is an exaggeration of shades of cream, off-​white, tawed or yellow. Yet the colour designation of ‘white*’ stays attached to this piece of skin that signifies the body of Christ. The phenomenon is comparable to a thought experiment by Wittgenstein: ‘If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and if snow were placed next to it and it then appeared grey, in its normal surroundings I would still be right in calling it white and not light grey. It could be that I use a more refined concept of white in, say, a laboratory’.71 A more refined concept of white is precisely what has been exaggerated in the leather costume of Christ. The absolute strikingness of Christ in suffering must be matched to the absolute strikingness of white*; and apparently, ‘light grey’ would not do the trick. The insistent linkage of whiteness with salvation and blackness with damnation corresponds to the figuration of spiritual warfare as a struggle between light and darkness in the Judeo-​Christian tradition. The fifth-​century text Liber Apolloni de secretis nature, for example, states that ‘Omnis enim colour ex candore et omnis albedo lucens. Lux igitur universa ex albedine procedens, si eius terminum excedat, obscura dicitur et fusca. Rursum omnis albedo vita, nigredo universa mors’ [All colour derives from whiteness, and all that is white is lucent. Thus everything that is luminous, proceeding from whiteness, if it should transgress its bounds, is called obscure and dark. Again, all whiteness is life, all blackness death].72 When the anonymous author postulates that all whiteness is life, he leans towards the idea of whiteness as the theory of

24

White before whiteness

everything. The convergence of pseudo-​science and metaphor, the linking of luminosity and whiteness and the coupling of candor and album betray not so much naivety or ignorance as confidence. Such confidence appears to be on triumphant display in the King of Tars, for instance, as conversion lightens the skin of the sultan from black to white, and true faith transforms a lifeless lump of flesh into a living body. Yet whiteness in the poem does not lead to social order or sustainable life; instead, whiteness exposes the fragile nature of desire, the precarious life of the body politic and the deadly gift of faith. The psycho-​temporal fantasy of whiteness that is the King of Tars therefore allows for a disruptive reading of the epistemological, ontological and teleological logics of whiteness as formulated in the Liber Apolloni: whiteness risks becoming a whiteness so luminous that it blinds. If all that is white is lucent (omnis albedo lucens), then rather than illumination, it is the whiteness confound. The confoundedness of whiteness is symptomatic of the precariousness of whiteness as manifest in objects and bodies, as well as of the collective struggles for sustainability and survival. White precarity is environmental and biopolitical, for it considers social ecology in the face of catastrophes across species and within the human social body. Modern biopolitics, Roberto Esposito contends, originated in the taxonomy of political categories. In its coupling of sovereign powers and technologies of life, biopolitics began as a sorting out of the politically useful and healthy bodies –​bodies worthy of protection –​from the politically useless and diseased bodies –​bodies worthy of destruction.73 A life-​affirming biopolitics, therefore, exists always in tandem with its negative counterpart, thanatopolitics. For a political subject under a biocratic regime, the experience of power is indistinct from the experience of life. Biopolitics has as its goal the management not of the individual subjectivity but of life itself. Esposito further argues that the formation of a biopolitical community is simultaneously an immunisation of the body politic from threats within and without. Viewed as either Foucauldian management or Espositian immunisation, biopower is a form of collective interpellation. However, ideological interpellation fails more often than not. And out of the failure of interpellation, Judith Butler contends, emerges precarity: ‘In some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being

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addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails’.74 Precarity is not fragility. Precarity may slip into fragility, and vice versa; but they are not the same things. Whereas white fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is primarily a defensive response mechanism, white precarity as the state of failed interpellation indexes the human capacity for woundedness. Precarity, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing contends, ‘is the condition of being vulnerable to others’.75 White precarity is the acknowledgement of the inherent but unmarked vulnerability of whiteness. One dominant strand of precarity studies is rooted in Marxism and its critique of capitalism.76 However, in addition to or because of economic plights, precarity is necessarily implicative of the psychic, affective and aesthetic dimensions of the human condition. As Isabell Lorey notes, ‘precarity in capitalism is nothing new’.77 What precarity studies does offer is a new theoretical language to examine medieval theology. Within the premodern context, issues of economic precarity are inextricable from matters of faith and religious difference, especially those between Christianity and Judaism. Theorists of precarity have distinguished among the concepts and deployments of terms like ‘precarity’, ‘precariousness’ and ‘precaritisation’ (sometimes ‘precarisation’). Precariousness, for Butler, is a shared existential condition; it is not individual; and it marks the fundamental interdependence of human sociality. As Butler suggests, precariousness is ‘a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form’.78 But if precariousness is universal and endemic to political life, precarity concerns the uneven differentiations of precariousness across various social groups. Precarity, as Lorey explains, denotes the effects of unequal distributions of precariousness: ‘Precarity designates striating and segmenting precariousness as conditions of inequality, the hierarchisation of “being-​with”, which accompanies processes of Othering’.79 Whereas Butler characterises precaritisation as ‘an ongoing process’, Lorey suggests that precaritisation also ‘designates not only working and living conditions but also ways of subjectivation, embodiment, and therefore agency’.80 Lorey further contends that the precarious is simultaneously the condition and effect of domination and security, what she terms ‘governmental precarization’.81 In other words, precaritisation is no longer

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the exception but has become normative under neoliberalism and enables governance through insecurity. Precaritisation, in fact, is one of the Foucauldian security technologies of late modernity. Though Lorey is examining specifically the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, her argument can be extended back to the premodern period. Precarity has always been unevenly distributed, represented and analysed, then and now. In this section, I examine two instances of medieval white precarity that engage questions of the religious other, material embodiment, and cultural consumption and aesthetic violence as acts of precaritisation. ‘Stretched white leather’, the third chapter that opens Part II, considers the intersection of whiteness and late medieval representations of the Passion in Langland’s Piers Plowman and in religious drama. In Passus XX of Piers Plowman, Langland reimagines the figure of Longinus as both Jewish and blind. For the recalcitrant Jews, whiteness signifies not salvation but their veil of spiritual blindness. And through his characterisations of Christ and the devils in the Harrowing of Hell episode that evoke those in medieval French and English Passion cycles, Langland engages directly with late medieval theatrical culture. Of particular interest is the use of masks and leather costumes in the performance of these plays; the devils were in blackface and black masks, and Christ in a white leather body-​suit. The material and devotional practices of whitlether straddle the animal-​human-​ divine continuum; the literal animal skin denotes the vulnerable flesh of God Incarnate and the charter of human redemption. Whit*lether is a pure sign of Christ’s suffering. If Christ’s body signifies the whole of Christian society, then Langland, by alluding to the material and devotional practices of white skins in Passus XX, steps outside of an imagined community organised on the basis of medieval clothing alone. Perhaps it is not with the image of society as a social fabric that one should read Piers Plowman; instead, society could be reconceived as a skin. At the interface of whiteness, leather and religion, the whitlether costume and the Christ Charter figure Christian salvation as a theology of precarity; that is, precarity defines the borders of a faith community. And the shared sense of Christian precariousness, as a mode of governance, is premised on the precaritisation of the Jews as Europe’s internal Other that must be disciplined, ‘stretched’ and eradicated.

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Chapter 4, ‘Flat white’, continues my examination of the deformational forces of white precarity. It reads Chaucer’s Sir Thopas through cuteness to shift critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilisation and feminisation triggers both tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas and the text become deformed. The flattening of physical and textual bodies leads to the obliteration of verticality and depth. Drawing on the superflat movement in Japanese contemporary art, I argue that cuteness in the tale, exemplified by the white bread-​like face of Thopas, effects a compression of the text’s narrative layers and semiotic networks. Mirroring the horizontal, non-​linear organisation of the poem’s layout in medieval manuscripts, desire moves sideways across Sir Thopas. The lateral mobility and the agglutinating property of cuteness allow it to adhere to and cutify objects in its vicinity; the catalogues of romance tropes in Sir Thopas thereby function as cute object clusters within a late medieval middling household. As a response to the anti-​Semitic violence in the Prioress’s Tale, Sir Thopas sublimates racial and religious violence via cutification, a form of culturalisation that flattens whiteness into consumable goods. White shame becomes indistinguishable from cute shame. Too much sticky sweetness, however, results in revulsion and not adoration. When the Host interrupts Chaucer and compares the poem to excrement, he enacts the labile fungibility of cuteness and disgust. Sir Thopas is both white* faeces and a dainty thing.

Racialicity Part III examines whiteness as a technique of premodern racialisation in the West. Denise Ferreira da Silva, in her critique of Western modernity, offers the conceptual term the ‘analytics of raciality’ in lieu of ‘raciality’ or ‘race’ alone. For da Silva, analytics is not merely discursive but is inextricable from raciality; it is a politico-​juridical programme and a mode of consciousness. The analytics of race is ‘the apparatus of knowledge manufactured by the science of man and society’.82 It is an ‘onto-​epistemological

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arsenal’ similar to a ‘political-​symbolic toolbox’.83 And it defines the human as the ethical subject who is white and European, and people of colour as agents of violence and a threat to social order. Furthermore, the analytics of raciality is constitutive of modernity and is based on the three principles of scientific knowledge: determinacy, separability and sequentiality.84 In contrast to da Silva’s onto-​epistemological approach to race, Hortense J. Spillers focuses on the psychoanalytics of racialisation, especially that of Black flesh under the brutal apparatuses of the Middle Passage and its afterlives. Anti-​Black violence cleaves Black corporeality into body and flesh. In Spillers’s analysis, flesh and body are not interchangeable or synonymous, for the body is an Enlightenment invention, a humanist tactic of enfleshment endowed with inalienable rights, signifying modernity, inherently white and male. Whereas the body is marked by discursive signs –​the semiotics of language and its signifying power –​on the skin, which renders the body legible and recognisable, the flesh is unmarked by and unassimilable into discourse and its representational tactics. When Black flesh is misread as black body through capitalist forms of racialisation, this illusory body, as well as its attendant fantasies of subjectivity or personhood, is but enfleshed property. Countering the regime of the Cartesian body, Spillers contends that ‘before the “body” there is the “flesh”, that zero degree of social conceptualisation that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography’.85 The flesh remains hidden beneath signification, unlike the body, which does, or appears to, escape the repressive concealment by discourse. In fact, the body’s inscription is always on display. The flesh endures, remains and does not vanish; its undecipherable markings of violent dispossession, what Spillers calls ‘the hieroglyphics of the flesh’, form an archive of negative affective histories.86 But the flesh is not literal, raw flesh, for it is a manifestation of sociality conceptualised. As the zero degree of the social, the flesh, according to Michelle Ann Stephens, ‘represents the body that sits on the very edge, on the underside, of the symbolic order, pre-​symbolic and pre-​linguistic, just before words and meaning’.87 In other words, the flesh is the temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body.

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What Spillers describes is racialisation as an operation of and on the flesh that produces the body. But if modernity hardens the cleavage between white body and Black flesh along the colour line, this is not necessarily so in premodernity. Somatic whiteness may not signify race at all. For instance, the late fourteenth-​century Dominican friar Henry Daniel, in his medical treatise Liber Uricrisiarum, suggests that the natural colour of flesh is white, not red: alle þe membrys in man are qwyte be weyze of kynde, al be it so þat þe flesche is red to þe syth, notforþan þat is not hys kynde colour for it is but colour accidental þat is disparplyd be þe pores of þe flesch; for zif þe blod be wel wrongyn out, men don to þe flesch þat þei etyn, elles if it be sod it turnyth toward qwyt þat xulde ben hys .88 [all the members in man are naturally white by the ways of nature, albeit the flesh is red to the sight, that is not its natural colour for it is but accidental colour, i.e. unproperly, for it has that colour due to another cause than its nature; for it is red because of blood that is dispersed by the pores of the flesh; for if flesh be parboiled and burst open, and blood be well wrung out, as these Irish men do to the meat that they eat, else it be heated to boil as we do it, bleached, and it turns toward white that should be its natural colour.]89

Flesh only appears red because of the infusion of blood in the tissues. If we were to wring the blood out, flesh would be white in colour. The whiteness of the flesh is a form of somatic whiteness before racialisation; it is a non-​if not pre-​discursive whiteness. Before racialisation and before the white* racial body, therefore, is the white flesh. Just as premodern somatic whiteness is not always a racial marker, medieval racialisation through whiteness does not always involve the human body or flesh, animate or not. Conceptually, biopolitics has undergirded the logics of modern white racism and its critique.90 However, racialisation and racism need not be theorised only in terms of biopolitics. I return to my opening example of the Great Khan’s dreams of a knight in white armour

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White before whiteness

on a white horse who foretells the Mongol empire. In this instance, whiteness activates racialisation not through the human skin but through a nonhuman animal and an inanimate object. This book rethinks how premodern racialisation works not only through but also other than dermal whiteness, suggesting that a key discourse of late medieval racialisation, as inflected by the trope of whiteness, is not biopolitics but animacy. As Mel Y. Chen contends, animacy is both ‘a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness’ and ‘a specific kind of affective and material construct that is … nonneutral in relation to animals, humans, and living and dead things’.91 Defining and policing the borders of the animate/​inanimate divide have real political consequences, for nonhuman beings and inanimate objects participate fully in ‘the regimes of life (making live) and coerced death (killing)’.92 Crucially, animacy troubles and undoes binaries of difference by putting pressure on biopolitics. In the Mongol example, insofar as the white armour and the white horse have agency and affect within the chivalric assemblage of rider, horse and armour, they are animated and animating, thereby participating in late medieval racialisation. Whiteness facilitates a kind of racial self-​recognition by animating the Mongol shaman’s horse and armour, documenting the cultural impulse to code chivalric markers as European and marking negatively the skin of the shaman as non-​white. Pushing the theoretical potential of animacy further, Elizabeth A. Povinelli reframes the critical conversation not in terms of life and death but of life and nonlife, for the binarism of life and death –​which brackets other events such as birth, growth and reproduction –​remains too attached to biopolitics.93 Foucauldian biopolitics is insufficient as a theory to analyse fully the workings of late liberalism, for the older figures of biopower –​Povinelli cites the hysterical woman, the perverse adult, and the masturbating child, among others in the Foucauldian pantheon of pathologies –​are no longer adequate in a radically changed cultural-​historical landscape in the early twentieth-​first century. Povinelli asks: ‘[D]‌oes biopolitics any longer gather together under its conceptual wings what needs to be thought if we are to understand contemporary late liberalism?’94 Historiographically, biopower has operated as a problematic and seemingly unbreachable period divider that locates the late

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eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the birth of biopolitics. Before modernity as biopower, sovereign power (the premodern) and disciplinary power (the early modern) characterised the earlier historical periods. Yet Foucault was unsure of the divisions –​temporal and/​or conceptual –​among the three formations of power; it might be more useful to conceive of the three paradigms as co-​presences.95 And geopolitically, biopower suffers from a ‘narcissistic provinciality’ that limits its reach, as well as its analysis, within the West.96 What Povinelli detects is an enrooted, recalcitrant and narcissistic biocentrism in the intellectual history of the West: ‘Western ontologies are covert biontologies –​Western metaphysics are a measure of all forms of existence by the qualities of one form of existence (bíos, zoē) –​and that biopolitics depends on this metaphysics being kept firmly in place’.97 Povinelli’s theory of biontology resonates uncannily with the historiography of premodern critical race studies since the late twentieth century.98 Hahn, for instance, has argued that medieval race is ‘constituted by religion, geopolitics, physiognomy, [and] color’.99 To Cohen, medieval race involves but is not reducible to colour; and ‘[a]lthough inextricably corporeal, race is also performative, a phenomenon of the body in motion’.100 Whitaker, in his analysis of the premodern racial mirage, argues that ‘race is a matter of language and literature at least as much as, if not more than, it is a matter of the visual’.101 And Heng, who theorises medieval race as a structuring of human difference, contends that ‘[n]ature/​biology and the sociocultural should not thus be seen as bifurcated spheres in medieval race-​formation: They often crisscrossed in the practices, institutions, fictions, and laws of a political –​and a biopolitical –​ theology operationalized on the bodies and lives of individuals and groups’.102 Running through the critical tactics, ontological strategies and epistemological formations of premodern race –​be they descent, customs, language, law, nationalism, religion, body, sexuality, gender, class, monstrosity, cartography, difference, metaphor, assemblage or fantasy –​is a shared conceptual matrix inflected by the human but defined and subtended by the biopolitical. What, then, are the limits and blind spots of premodern critical race studies if it were powered exclusively by biopolitics? What does it

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recognise, misrecognise or refuse to recognise? Can premodern critical race studies resist a recursive replication of the biontological? New figurations and tactics of power demand new theories. Instead of biopower, Povinelli offers geontopower (the power of nonlife) as a more expansive and productive concept in thinking through tactics of political governance. Geontopower, however, is not a new figure of analysis emerging from twenty-​first-​century late liberalism meant to replace biopolitics, for ‘biopower (the governance through life and death) has long depended on a subtending geontopower (the difference between the lively and the inert)’.103 If Povinelli conceives of geontopolitics as a mode of critique that breaks free of the periodising constraints of biopolitics and makes visible the figural tactics of power in late liberalism, I argue that, as an analytic tool that resists the impulses of historical categorisation, it need not confine itself to the latest phase of postmodernity.104 Indeed, the long intertwining histories of biopower and geontopower are productive in making visible the operative logic of premodern racialisation that is not anchored solely on biopolitics or (post-​)humanism. In the King of Tars, for instance, the lump of flesh, the product of an interfaith miscegenation between a black sultan and a white Christian princess, initially ‘lay ded as the ston’ (582) after birth. Yet racialisation in the romance works not simply through the biopower of Christian baptism that transforms the stony lump into a human baby but through an animacy scale of stone, lump and baby. That is, the lump is already an animate, racialised agent; racialisation’s biopower depends on geontopower. This is not to suggest that racialisation, premodern or otherwise, does not involve life and its affiliated markers, especially those that index human difference. Nor is it to suggest that dermal whiteness has not participated in the biologisation of race. What I am arguing for is that in studies of premodern whiteness and race, an overdependence on biopolitics (skin tone, body, population and life) reinscribes the familiar teleology of modern biologising of race, reasserts the indivisibility of whiteness and narratives of life and recentres the theology of whiteness as salvific colour that the Liber Apollini espouses. We see the effects of biontological thinking in the reception history of the King of Tars, for example, as critics have continued to read the lump of flesh literally as a monstrous

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body, as a formless blob that results from miscegenation and as a sign of the superiority of the white Christian body. Much of the poem’s criticism, especially on questions of race and religion in the tale, is premised on Foucauldian biopolitics and thanatopolitics.105 A biopolitical interpretation prioritises unquestionable signs of life, race and gender, whereas a geontopolitical reading suggests that perhaps the lump-​stone-​child is the result of the inability to recognise life outside the strictures of religion. It is not that the Sultan and the Christian princess cannot see, but that they are incapable of seeing the child as human; the child therefore appears formless, nonhuman and inanimate. To unpack the tactics of premodern racialisation, we first need to reconceive of racialisation not only as the governance of life and death but as the governance of life and nonlife, extending to the nonhuman and the inanimate. Or, borrowing Spillers’s terminology, I would suggest that the extension of analysis to the geontopolitical is an acknowledgement of the zero degree of social conceptualisation. In so doing, premodern critical race studies could break free of the hold of historicist genealogy and attend to the asynchrony and heterogeneous temporalities of race then and now.106 Michel Serres’s figure of a crumpled handkerchief reimagines time not as a teleological line but as a foldable sheet where points in time can be brought into close contact or pry far apart.107 In matters of race, the past touches the present through proximity and continuity. Because race is multitemporal, we must examine critically its premodern figurations in order to resist misappropriations of the past that buttress modern racism. For instance, twenty-​ first-​century Identitarianism advocates a medievalism that distorts the Middle Ages in the service of its racist ideology. Guillaume Faye, the French intellectual of the New Right, envisions Europe as a white ethnosphere rooted in the ancestral values of medieval Christendom. Out of the chaos of the modern age, Faye predicts, emerges ‘un Nouveau Moyen Âge’, a new golden age of racist medievalism.108 A united Europe will be a ‘neo-​Carolingian community’, and ‘the year 2050 will resemble the year 500’.109 Faye’s white utopia is premised on a Middle Ages that never was. I will return to matters of whiteness, racial supremacy and medievalism in the conclusion to the book.

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White before whiteness

The challenge of premodern critical race studies is to examine past constructions of race, as well as their present articulations, through theoretical lenses both established and emergent. A critically useful way forward is through Sedgwick’s concept of interdigitation, which offers an alternate conceptual space to re-​interrogate medieval race. In apposition with da Silva’s notion of the ‘analytics of raciality’, I propose ‘racialicity’ as the operative term for premodern critical race studies. Racialicity, as a modality of interdigitation, might better capture matters of race in premodernity, for it recognises race, racism and racialism, while acknowledging the historical violence of racialist logistics both latent and manifest. Racialicity shifts the critical conversation away from the definitional quagmire of ‘race’ versus ‘ethnicity’ –​the ‘is it or is it not’ stricture of a false dichotomy. Likewise, racialicity tends to alterity, difference, otherness and estrangement without softening their racialising powers. Racialicity sidesteps the stalemate between presence and absence because the absence of ‘race’ is itself a kind of racialicity. As such, racialicity is not reducible to spectre, trace, adumbration or aura; it is an act of conjuration and a condition of permeation. Whiteness, as well as blackness, typifies the paradoxical concomitance of racial absence as presence. Racialicity enfolds genealogy without periodisation or teleology. It is performative and periperformative, material and immaterial, circulative and accumulative. And despite the multiplicity and volatility of race, racialicity is not a situational construct. Racialicity seeps into the quotidian and the personal and powers the historical and the communal. It is the condition of race and the tracking of its periodic metamorphosis into racism. Racialicity is structure and event, as much as it is capacity and recursion. It is a conjugation of relationality, an empire of signs, and interconnected networks of partitioned bodies. Racialicity indexes the firmness of fragility and the instilment of precarity. Chapter 5, ‘White dorsality’, examines the imbrication of whiteness, racialisation and conversion in the Middle English romance the King of Tars. The scopic regime of Christianity operates like a facial recognition system, whose limitations reflect ideological biases: faith determines whether an animate assemblage is a formless lump of flesh or an enfaced human body. Racialisation

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and conversion are somatechnologisations of the human, in which the figure of the turn enacts the interpellation of the white Christian subject. But the turn towards whiteness necessitates a backward turn –​a dorsal turn –​to the flesh, before the production of the body. It is a public secret, whose revelation is only possible through the defacement of whiteness that has become normalised and social. Moreover, racialisation materialises as a double inscription of violence: first, on the flesh, then the body. Both articulations leave behind ineradicable hieroglyphics of brutality upon the material surface. Conversion imposes a white body upon the Black flesh; as such, whiteness is an operation of anti-​Blackness. Yet in medieval medicine, the natural colour of flesh is conceived as white. The white of the flesh thus stands before the whiteness of the racialised and converted body. Whiteness as racial property defines the white melancholic subject, whose self-​impoverishment is indistinguishable from self-​ fashioning. The drive to fabricate and possess a white, racialised and Christian identity is the compulsion of habeas album: the production of the white* melancholic body as thing and property. But before the making of property, the dorsality of whiteness is the structure of the flesh behind the contours of the body. The final chapter in Part III, ‘In the lap of whiteness’, turns to the convergence of whiteness, periodisation and racialisation. Modernity, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney theorise, is sutured by the hold of the slave ship that generates a new kind of feel and feeling.110 The hold might appear to give birth to modern colonialism, capitalism and liberalism; yet by the fact of its emergence and its terrible cargo, the hold is already troubled by multiple temporalities. That is, the hold is both a racialising and periodising technology. This chapter considers the premodern hold and asks, firstly, what forms it takes; secondly, what bodies it traffics; and thirdly, what racialised affective communities it produces. Whereas emotion works through historicisation to pin down a precise subject identity, affect deploys abstraction to construct a timeless truth about bodily intensity. I take Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale as my axiomatic example, where Canacee’s lappe is a magical object that recognises and enfolds racialised whiteness, in the form of a courtly female falcon, through empathy. Medieval romance –​because of

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White before whiteness

its insistence on historicity rather than history, periodicity rather than period and racialicity rather than race –​is one crucial hold that figures affective abstraction and emotional historicisation as entangled modes of premodern racialisation and periodisation.

Operative difference Whiteness is not something one passes through, Sara Ahmed cautions. In fact, ‘[i]‌t can be problematic to describe whiteness as something we “pass through”: such an argument could make whiteness into something substantive, as if whiteness has an ontological force of its own, which compels us, and even “drives” action’.111 It does not. Yet whiteness seems to possess an ontological force of its own, in the form of public comfort –​in the sense of ease and satisfaction –​that shapes the encounter between the white body and the non-​white flesh. As Ahmed observes, ‘[t]o be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment’.112 Making white subjects comfortable, in this sense, is an operation of whiteness. The Conclusion, ‘White environmentality’, returns to late twentieth-​and early twentieth-​ first-​ century white medievalism as a racial category and considers whiteness both as a form of privileged environmental comfort and as an operation of racial recognition politics. I open with a reflection on modern whiteness as a deadly form of Foucauldian environmentality. The Conclusion then investigates the intersection among and the coalescence of postmodern neomedievalism, environmental activism and nostalgic Southern pastoralism in the crafting of American white supremacist ideologies, especially that of the fraternity formerly known as Identity Evropa that rose to international prominence in the aftermath of Charlottesville 2017. By deliberately co-​opting the rhetorics and tactics of environmentalism, Identitarians have enacted a conceptual slide between ‘environment’ as world and as metaphor; environmentalism masks environmentality as a white racialised biopower. I also explore the intellectual underpinnings of Identitarianism in the work of Faye, whose strategic deployments and polemical contortions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ both mimic and co-​opt academic discourse within early medieval studies; the rhetorical elision of ethnicity and race provides a convenient cover for

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mainstreaming pan-​ European white nationalism and revisionist historiography. Identitarians, by upgrading ecofascist tactics and Malthusian logic, situate themselves at the nexus of late capitalist precariat and contemporary economic, environmental and political crises. In contrast to Hedley Bull’s neomedievalism, Faye’s New Middle Ages is an archeofuturistic racialist imperium that rejects neoliberalism’s multiracial globalisation, revives fictive ancestral values and envisions a medievalised geopolitical sanctum of whiteness. I then shift to a reflection on white environmentality as a technique of racial violence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, arguing that it takes the form of what Peter Sloterdijk terms atmoterrorism.113 I end with a consideration of the politics of white fragility and precarity in the neoliberal university. Teaching Ishiguro’s text, part of the literature of white liberalism, demands resistance to a racialised comfort zone of learning. This book is not a history of whiteness. I in no way claim to write the kinds of cultural histories or surveys of colours as found in Michel Pastoureau’s works on white and black, as well as other colours; in Herman Pleij’s Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages and After; or in the multi-​volume The Image of the Black in Western Art by David Bindman and Henry L. Gates.114 My interest lies not in cataloguing every possible allusion to whiteness in the late Middle Ages, a monumental task well beyond the scope of the present study. Whiteness is not everywhere. Nor is whiteness studies a critical panacea that is the theory of everything.115 In particular medieval moments, whiteness appears to be in danger of becoming prosaic and unremarkable, even generic. Replicated and disseminated through cultural artefacts, both the whiteness of the courtly heroine in the Book of the Duchess and that of the maiden in Pearl, for instance, might easily be glossed over as mere conventions of their respective genres. Similarly, the notion that whiteness constitutes the normative and the hegemonic in the West might seem, to some, an academic truism that is by now blandly predictable. However, does not blandness already conjure up whiteness, the absence of colours and flavours? If white is the colour of critical blandness, does it not signify some a priori epistemology of whiteness as we know it? But has there ever been any whiteness,

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White before whiteness

medieval or (post-​ )modern, as we know it? If whiteness seems bland, it shows how deeply entrenched whiteness has become, in the words of Alfred J. López, the ‘tacit norm’ and the ‘cultural imperative’ within certain academic discourses.116 Or, as Chen remarks, whiteness seems to launch its own trajectory of whitening to the extent that ‘[w]‌hiteness and its associated colonialities just feel especially sticky, to the detriment of all scholarship’.117 Too often, reading of whiteness becomes reading as whiteness, that is, a reading blindfolded by a white opaqueness that veils inquiry. By re-​iterating the trope of whiteness as a veil, I caution against the faith that the white integument of blindness would necessarily lead to, as Paul de Man might put it, critical insights through a hermeneutics of unveiling. Though whiteness fades into the unremarkable, it always returns ‘in ways that are unwanted or unexpected’.118 And if whiteness is never absolute, singular or static, whiteness studies is always ‘full of holes and contradictions’.119 In our moment of renewed focus on race relations in the twenty-​first century, assumptions and questions of what whiteness is and means have occupied critical discussions. If whiteness had hardened into an identity politics defined by skin tone alone, this book argues that it has not always been so. And if whiteness were a social performance, it nonetheless cannot fully escape attachment to materiality. Operations of white*ness may generate differences that fabricate, structure and connect the social world, but these operative differences are never transparent, stable or permanent.

Notes 1 M. C. Seymour (ed.), On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of ‘Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum’. A Critical Text, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975–​78), vol. 2, p. 1277. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), sec. I.37. 3 See Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 231.

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4 John H. Chandler (ed.), The King of Tars (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015). Citations by line numbers. 5 Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 6. 6 P. Hamelius (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels, EETS o.s. 153 and 154 (London: Paul, 1919–23), p. 147. 7 Hetoum, A Lytell Cronycle: Richard Pynson’s Translation (c. 1520) of La fleur des histories de la Terre d’Orient (c. 1307), ed. Glenn Burger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 26. 8 Hamelius (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels, p. 147. 9 Mike Hill, ‘Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-​la: Whiteness, Writing, and Other Ordinary Terrors’, in Mike Hill (ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 2. 10 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994), p. 24. 11 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (eds), Critical Whiteness Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For overviews of the first and second wave of Critical Whiteness Studies, see James C. Jupp, ‘First-​Wave Critical White Studies’, in Zachary A. Casey (ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 222–​30; and James C. Jupp and Pauli Badenhorst, ‘Second-​ Wave Critical White Studies’, in Zachary A. Casey (ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 596–​608. 12 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and Thomas Hahn (ed.), ‘The Concepts of Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages’, special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001). 13 For an overview, see Dorothy Kim, ‘Introduction to Literature Compass Special Cluster: Critical Race and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16:9–10 (2019), 3–​8. 14 William Chester Jordan, ‘Why “Race”?’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001), 165–​73; Thomas Hahn, ‘The Difference the Middle Ages Make: Color and Race before the Modern World’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001), 1–​37.

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15 For specific examples, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–​ 1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 197–​242. 16 Bartlett, Making of Europe, p. 197. See also Robert Bartlett, ‘Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001), 39–​56. 17 Ania Loomba, ‘Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique’, New Literary History, 40:3 (2009), 509. 18 See, for example, Heng, Empire of Magic; and Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). See also, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), 19–​41; Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient,1100–​1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); and M. Lindsay Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 19 For surveys of the field, including Hahn’s 2001 special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Race’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2013), pp. 113–​ 16; Kaplan, Figuring Racism, pp. 1–​ 18, 169–​ 76; Heng, Invention of Race, pp. 24–​7; Dorothy Kim, ‘The Politics of the Medieval Preracial’, Literature Compass, 18:10 (2021), 1–​9; and Cord J. Whitaker, ‘Race-​ ing the Dragon: The Middle Ages, Race and Trippin’ into the Future’, postmedieval, 6:1 (2015), 6–​7. 20 Cohen, ‘Race’, p. 111. 21 Heng, Invention of Race, p. 27. 22 Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​ Thinking (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 4 and 6. 23 Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 1. 24 See Cohen, Postcolonial Middle Ages. Cohen argues that the modern concept of race ‘has no exact medieval equivalent’ (p. 517). Similarly, Hahn argues that in the Middle Ages, there was a greater ‘disconnect between dominant medieval racial discourses … and the common assumption that colour constitutes the default category of difference’ (‘Difference the Middle Ages Make’, 8, original emphasis).

14

Introduction

41

25 Book 19, c­ hapter 11, in Seymour (ed.), On the Properties of Things, pp. 1284–​5. 26 Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, Book 15, ­chapter 50, in Seymour (ed.), On the Properties of Things, pp. 752–​3. The tenth-​century Abbasid historian and geographer Al-​Mas’udi holds the opposite view: the coldness of the North turns the skin of Europeans white but also makes their nature gross, manners harsh and understanding dull. See Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 270. 27 Sarah Roche-​Mahdi (trans.), Silence: A Thirteenth-​Century French Romance (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1992), p. 137. See also Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 139–​43. 28 For St. Maurice, see Heng, Invention of Race, pp. 222–​42. 29 David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (eds), Roman van Moriaen, vol. 4 of Dutch Romances (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, forthcoming). 30 Madeline Caviness, ‘From the Self-​Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’, Different Visions, l (2008), 1–​33. 31 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 211. 32 Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). See also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (London: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5. 33 Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 50. 34 Ibid., p. 52. See also Reese Simpkins, ‘Trans*feminist Intersection’, TSQ, 3:1–​2 (2016), 228–​34; and Avery Tompkins, ‘Asterisk’, TSQ, 1:1–​2 (2014), 26–​7. 35 Tompkins, ‘Asterisk’, 27. 36 Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, ‘Tranimalities in the Age of Trans* Life’, TSQ, 2:2 (2015), 196. 37 Ibid., 198. 38 Halberstam, Trans*, p. 50. 39 Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 2. 40 Ibid., p. 8. 41 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 67.

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42 Ibid., p. 67. 43 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Extraction, Logistics, Finance: Global Crisis and the Politics of Operations’, Radical Philosophy, 178 (2013), 15. 44 Ibid., 15. 45 Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED), s.v. ‘operacioun’, 1, 2(a), 2(b) and 3(a). 46 Greti Dinkova-​ Bruun, Giles E. M. Gasper, Michael Huxtable, Tom C. B. McLeish, Cecilia Panti and Hannah Smithson (eds), The Dimensions of Colour. Robert Grosseteste’s De Colore: Edition, Translation, and Interdisciplinary Analysis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013), p. 17. 47 Dinkova-​Bruun, et al. (eds), Robert Grosseteste’s De Colore, p. 82. 48 See Emily Steiner, John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 143–​76. 49 For the White Festival, see Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. Sharon Kinoshita (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2016), pp. 78–​ 80. Thomas T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 59. Allsen also cites how ‘[a]‌ t the birth of Muqali, later Chinggis Qan’s viceroy in North China, “there was white vapor that arose from the tent’s interior” to inform all that this was a child with a brilliant future’ (p. 58). And in 1206, the Mongols set up the ‘white standard’ and called it ‘the banner of Chinggis Qan’s good fortune’ (p. 59). 50 Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, p. 60. 51 Igor de Rachewiltz, The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2004), vol. 1, p. 148. 52 See Christopher P. Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2004), pp. 530–​1. Atwood notes that medieval Mongols believed Teb Tenggri ‘rode into heaven on a gray steed’ (531). 53 On the origins of St. George, see Jonathan Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 21–​51. For the iconographic history of the rider on the white horse in the visual arts, see Georgiana Goddard King, ‘The Rider on the White Horse’, Art Bulletin, 5:1 (1922), 2–​9. 54 Richard H. Godden, ‘Prosthetic Ecologies: Vulnerable Bodies and the Dismodern Subject in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Textual

34

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43

Practice, 30:7 (2016), 1274–​5. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls the chivalric assemblage a ‘chivalric circuit’ in his Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 45. 55 Hetoum presents a similarly divided portrait of Ghazan, the seventh Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate, that severs the physiological from the chivalric. While Ghazan’s military prowess and generosity render him a paradigm of chivalry indistinguishable from Western knights, Hetoum notes that he is short and ugly: ‘And marueyll it was that so lytell a body myght haue so great vertue, for among a M men could nat be so sklender a man, nor so euyl made, nor a fouler man. He surmounted all other in prowesse and vertue’ (Lytell Cronycle, p. 54). 56 Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3:3 (2011), 54–​70. 57 Richard Sorabji (ed. and trans.), Aristotle on Memory (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1972), p. 56. 58 Anselm’s De Grammatico, sec. 14. The Latin is in Franciscus Salesius Schmitt (ed.), S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1946), p. 160. 59 Translation in Desmond Paul Henry (trans.), The De Grammatico of St. Anselm: The Theory of Paronymy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), pp. 67–​8. 60 Peter W. Travis, ‘White’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 5. 61 Henry (trans.), The De Grammatico of St. Anselm, pp. 68–​9. 62 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 162. 63 Ibid., p. 164. 64 David Katz, The World of Colour, trans. R. B. MacLeod and C. W. Fox (London: Paul, 1935), p. 164, my emphasis. 65 Katz, World of Colour, p. 164. 66 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 149. 67 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, sec. I.68. 68 The Latin is in Schmitt (ed.), S. Anselmi, p. 160. Translation is in Henry (trans.), De Grammatico of St. Anselm p. 68, my emphasis. 69 Katz, World of Colour, p. 162. 70 See Marc H. Bornstein, ‘Chromatic Vision in Infancy’, in Hayne W. Reese and Lewis P. Lipsitt (eds), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, vol. 12 (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 117–​82, especially p. 132. 71 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, sec. I.5.

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72 Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), p. 77. 73 Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 74 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 130. 75 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 10. 76 See for instance, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks’, Variant, 25 (2006), 10–​13. 77 In Jasbir Puar (ed.), ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56:4 (2012), 165. 78 Ibid., 169. 79 Isabell Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal: EIPCP Multilingual Webjournal (January 2011). http://​ eipcp.net/​tran​sver​sal/​0811/​lorey/​en. Original emphasis. (Accessed on 5 May 2020). 80 Butler in Puar (ed.), ‘Precarity Talk’, 169; Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, n.p. 81 Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, n.p. 82 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2007), p. xv. 83 Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘No-​bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence’, Griffith Law Review, 18:2 (2009), 213 and 219. 84 Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘On Difference Without Separability’, in 32nd Bienal De São Paulo Art Biennial: Incerteza viva, 7 Sept–​11 Dec 2016, Catalogue (São Paulo: Ministry of Culture, 2016), pp. 57–​65. 85 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17:2 (1987), 67. 86 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby’, 67. For Black flesh as the repository of negative affective histories, see Alvin J. Henry, Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), p. 5. 87 Michelle Ann Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 3. 88 London, British Library, Sloane MS 1101, fol. 164r. Transcribed by E. Ruth Harvey. I would like to thank Sarah Star and Professor Harvey for generously sharing the transcription with me. See Henry Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition, ed. E. Ruth Harvey,

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M. Teresa Tavormina and Sarah Star (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 89 My translation. 90 See Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–​1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-​Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Esposito, Bíos. More recently, Sokthan Yeng, The Biopolitics of Race: State Racism and U.S. Immigration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013); and Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 91 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 2 and 5. 92 Ibid., p. 6. 93 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 94 Ibid., p. 5. 95 For a critique of the periodising effects of biopolitics, see ibid., pp. 5–​7. 96 Ibid., p. 3. 97 Ibid., p. 5. 98 ‘Premodern Critical Race Studies’ (PCRS) is coined by Margo Hendricks, in ‘Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race’, The Folger Institute, https://​www.fol​ger.edu/​instit​ute/scholarly-​programs/​race-​ periodization/​margo-​hendricks​. (Accessed on 1 May 2021). 99 Hahn, ‘Difference the Middle Ages Make’, 26. 100 Cohen, ‘Race’, p. 111. 101 Whitaker, Black Metaphors, p. 4. 102 Heng, Invention of Race, p. 3, original emphasis. 103 Ibid., p. 5. 104 Ibid., pp. 5–​6. 105 See, for instance, Jane Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction: The Lump-​Child and Its Parents in The King of Tars’, in Nicola McDonald (ed.), Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 102–​ 23; Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 113–​21; and Anna Czarnowus, ‘ “Stille as Ston”: Oriental Deformity in The King of Tars’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 44 (2008), 463–​74. 106 See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University

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Press, 2012). For Dinshaw, asynchrony characterises the nature of the human condition past, present and future. Temporal heterogeneity allows for a more intimate and queer understanding of the interconnections among objects, persons and events. 107 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 57–​60. 108 Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, trans. M. O’Meara (London: Arktos Media, 2011), p. 268. 109 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 50. Guillaume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes, trans. E. Kopff (London: Arktos Media, 2012), p. 201. 110 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), pp. 87–​99. 111 Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8:2 (2007), 159. 112 Ibid., 158. 113 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Introduction: Airquake’, in Foams: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016), pp. 85–​242. 114 Michel Pastoureau, White: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023); and his Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Herman Pleij, Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages and After, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and David Bindman and Henry L. Gates, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976–​89). 115 See Hill on ‘the great white hype’ surrounding the emergence of whiteness studies in the 1990s, in Hill, After Whiteness, p. 3. 116 Alfred J. López (ed.), Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 156. 117 Chen, Animacies, p. 319. 118 Hill, After Whiteness, p. 2. 119 Hill, Critical Whiteness, p. 7.

Part I Fragility

1 Memorialisation in white

E ‘Ov’è ella?’ súbito diss’io. [And ‘Where is she?’ I said at once.] –​ Dante, Paradiso1 They always say, ‘But where is he?’ The question assumes that the philosopher must define at the outset a grounding, a base, a principle, that he must remain fixed on a foundation. –​Michel Serres, Éclaircissements2

In the Book of the Duchess, the Chaucerian Dreamer grieves over an unnamed loss and is plagued by a ‘defaute of slep’ (5).3 Defaute, as both lack and loss, marks the state of melancholy and the work of memorialisation of the Dreamer and the Man in Black. In an attempt to cure his insomnia, the Dreamer retells the Greek myth of Alcyone and Ceyx. While Alcyone is spatially linked to the couple’s home (77, 79), Ceyx chooses to go elsewhere and later drowns in the sea. Desirous of learning Ceyx’s fate, Alcyone soon ‘sent bothe eest and west /​To seke him’ (88–​9). And when no news arrives, she sinks into an inconsolable grief. Readers of the poem have often drawn parallels between the Alcyone episode and the dream of the Man in Black in terms of the problematics of consolation.4 However, what is important here is not only the work of mourning and consolation but also space, as indicated by the tale’s articulations of directional and spatial markers. More precisely, ‘Where is he?’ is the question that consumes Alcyone, just as the Dreamer will later ask of the Man in Black ‘where’ the deceased White is.5 As she searches everywhere and nowhere, Alcyone becomes frustrated by her inability to locate Ceyx and is at fault, in the sense of becoming ‘puzzled [and] at a loss’.6 Alcyone’s trauma suggests a link between acts of memorialisation and spatialisation; proper mourning presupposes

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Fragility

the necessary localisation of the dead in space and time. And more than the localisation of the body, what is at stake here is the localisation of subjectivity, for without space, the embodied subject cannot exist. As Liz Bondi and Joyce Davidson suggest, ‘to be is to be somewhere’.7 Adopting the Middle English defaute as a theory and a methodology, I argue that the Book of the Duchess exhibits two distinct modes of whiteness refracted through space and time. The first is a normative and recognisable whiteness produced by the linkage of the courtly lady ‘White’ and the male subject, whose masculine chivalric identity is superior and pure. This form of whiteness makes possible a productive erasure of local and individual difference through a deliberate evocation of an international, universalising courtliness emblematised in French courtly literature. It is a whiteness that occupies the then and there. The second is a particularising and literalising mode of whiteness that is emphatically ‘English’ –​the here and now. The newer if not more ‘modern’ form of whiteness being developed in the Book of the Duchess needs to localise and particularise the universals: the poem opens with the generic courtly Lady named White but ends on a white castle on a rich hill that alludes to John of Gaunt and his deceased wife Blanche. It is a whiteness that acknowledges its own limits or borders, be they linguistic, cultural or proto-​national. The naming and mapping of the lady White appears to feed into the structuring of a universal and ideologically secure voice and identity coded as white, masculine and aristocratic. Yet the Dreamer’s literalising and Englishing mode of questioning the Man in Black interrupts the normal unfolding of consolation and insists on the local and the particular, for they are the specific tags of memories that shape subjectivity. The two male writing selves, practitioners of white fragility as a reactionary politics, present whiteness as embodying both the universalising and the particularising modes of aristocratic self-​ fashioning. Because courtly love is a tautological love of the courtly, and because fragility undergirds courtliness, the Chaucerian ‘I’ is what I would term a ‘white fragiliac’, the masculine subject in mourning who must write his way out of whiteness as an extreme state of paralysis and death.

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51

The toponymic chain of White Chaucer’s use of defaute in the Book of the Duchess suggests that loss and mourning are acts of ungrounding. The Middle English defaute and faute share many common semantic and etymological histories. But the prefix de-​ in defaute carries the added senses of ‘down, down from, down to,’ ‘off, away, aside’ and ‘away from oneself’, as well as the function of ‘undoing or reversing’ the action of the main verb.8 What de-​brings to faute is both spatialisation and temporalisation. The juncture of space and memorialisation in the poem can be approached through Michel Serres’s topology of time, ‘the study of the spatial properties of an object that remain invariant under homeomorphic deformation, which is to say, broadly, actions of stretching, squeezing, or folding, but not tearing or breaking’.9 Unlike geometry and linear time, topology is time that is multiple, crumpling and foldable: time is a handkerchief on which any two points can be spread out far apart by stretching or be superimposed by crumpling.10 For Serres, topology addresses questions of ‘What is closed? What is open? What is a connective path? What is a tear? What are the continuous and the discontinuous? What is a threshold, a limit?’11 That is, topology is concerned with deformations of subjectivity. In the Book of the Duchess, topological tears and connective paths are found in praxes of toponomy and cartography, both of which are inseparable from mourning: defaute as a topological disturbance of faute. Central to the work of memorialisation in the Book of the Duchess is the figure of the deceased lady named White. Whereas critics have traditionally focused on the problematic status of ‘White’ as a narrative trope, a linguistic sign and a proper noun, I would like to extend the examination of proper naming to other proper nouns in the text in addition to ‘White’.12 Specifically, I want to look at Chaucer’s articulations of toponyms, or place-​names. The Book of the Duchess exhibits a self-​conscious impulse towards the mapping and naming of spaces, as well as the localising of bodies and memories; my guide to toponymy, ‘a forging of proper names’, will be the theoretical and historical work of Christian Jacob on cartography.13

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To dream, or to fall asleep, is itself a spatialising act.14 Though fixed at a tree within the dreamscape, the Man in Black is nonetheless engaged in his own production of spatial demarcation through the practice of toponymy. In his portrayal of his lady, he notes that she would not give her suitors false hope, Ne sende men into Walakye, To Pruyse, and into Tartarye, To Alysaundre, ne into Turkye, And byd hym faste anoon that he Goo hoodles into the Drye Se And come hom by the Carrenar. (1024–​9)

Later, the Man in Black proclaims that his love for White is above ‘al the rychesse /​That ever was in Babyloyne, /​In Cartage, or in Macedoyne, /​Or in Rome, or in Nynyve’ (1060–​3). The Man in Black’s litanies of toponyms are not only rhetorical flourishes but cartographical renderings as well. The toponyms create topological fault lines that carve out spatial identities. Evelyn Edson has pointed out that early medieval maps, such as the one on folio 64r of British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XII containing Isidore’s De natura rerum from tenth-​century England, sometimes take the form of what she terms the ‘list map’, which has the basic T-​O cartographic frame and groups toponyms in geographically suggestive ways.15 In addition, the diagram within the list map could have functioned as a memory aid that facilitates the sorting out and recalling of the list of toponyms.16 Through his iterations of toponyms that create a virtual map, the Man in Black turns himself, the Dreamer and his audience into map readers whose eyes are guided by their memories and habits. Toponymy in the Book of the Duchess is intimately linked to the poem’s practices of memory. Tracing the history of medieval practices of memory, Mary Carruthers notes that memory schemes involve the tagging of materials both schematically and emotionally.17 Toponymy, as figured in the Book of the Duchess, becomes a device for the Man in Black to tag his memory of White. As Jacob contends, toponymy engages with both collective memory and the individual’s ‘emotional landscape and biographical memory’.18 In other words, the toponym invites the individual reactivation of memories that have been associated with it. For the Man in

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53

Figure 1.1  Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum. British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XII, fol. 64r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Black, Alexandria and Tartary are not empty place-​names but a geographic measure of his lady’s virtues. Like points on Serres’s topological handkerchief, toponyms fold over, touch one another through time and space and connect the mourner and the mourned. For the audience of the poem, these toponyms also allude to conventions of courtly love in which a lady’s love is contingent on a knight’s proof of exotic exploits and service. Toponymy thus effects a virtual mapping of the courtly, an international French-​inspired high culture, exemplified in the writings of authors such as Jean

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Froissart and Guillaume de Machaut, to which Chaucer responds. The Man in Black’s allusions to Prussia and Tartary may echo these lines from Machaut’s Le Dit dou Lyon: ‘But among the true lovers are those who fight abroad for their lady’s honour from Cyprus to Alexandria … to the Dry Tree … to Prussia … to Tartary, among very many other places’.19 Through its status as a proper name, ‘White’ is initially conceived by the Man in Black as embodying the ‘stabilizing power of “proper” naming’.20 For Aristotle, as well as for later medieval thinkers, memory requires the production and retention of ‘images’.21 In the Book of the Duchess, White functions as the signifying image that anchors memory; this is the hope of the Man in Black. More than a proper name that imagistically signifies the work of memory, ‘White’ is also a toponym that names a woman’s body that exists, or rather existed, in space. The Man in Black offers an extended blazon of White’s body that details her ‘white handes’ (955), her neck that is white and smooth and other parts of her well-​proportioned body.22 ‘White’, through the virtue of its proper name, signifies both a spatialised body and a map of that body. The practice of superimposing the map and the body, blurring the boundaries between the two, was common in medieval cartography. On many medieval mappaemundi, such as the mid-​ thirteenth-​century Ebstorf Map and the early fourteenth-​century Lambeth Map from Nennius’s Historia Britonum, maps of the known world are figured with the body of Christ superimposed –​ Jesus’ head is oriented to the east, his hands to the north and south, his feet to the west, and his navel signifies the city of Jerusalem. Another medieval example, perhaps an extreme case, is the works of Opicinus de Canistris (1296–​1355), a scribe who worked at the papal court at Avignon. Fusing the new portolan charts of the fourteenth century and the older T-​O mappaemundi, Opicinus drew a series of maps in which Europe and North Africa become the literal figures and features of men’s and women’s bodies. Opicinus’s maps are emblematic of Serres’s topology of time and history. For Serres, because topology is concerned only with what stays constant through transformations, a triangle is topologically equivalent to a circle, and a doughnut to a teacup.23 Similarly, for Opicinus, the lines of bodily and geographical spaces

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Figure 1.2  Opicinus de Canistris. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Lat. 6435, fol. 84v–​85r. (© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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are simultaneously a schema of the cosmos, the physical landscape and the self; differences or errors are rendered topologically equivalent. His maps function like Serres’s handkerchief: there is no fault, only a topology of coincidence. Matthew H. Edney, in his discussion of maps and the female body, suggests that the female body can be treated and manipulated like a map. In his reading of the cover of the March 1943 issue of G-​Men Detective, Edney argues that social anxiety about control over intelligence information during World War II is expressed in terms of control over a woman’s body, especially as a map imprinted on her back. The feminised fault lines that map the struggle for political survival suggests maps’ functions ‘as focal points for their reader’s desires and fears, permitting their readers to give meaning to the territories that have no necessary basis in fact’.24 In this particular instance, to map is to impose meaning onto feminised bodies and territories. A similar strategy is at work in the Book of the Duchess. White’s body can be read cartographically. Each of her bodily spaces, like a toponym, evokes memories of her previous existence for the Man in Black. Like mapping of toponyms, the mapping in the Book of the Duchess is not only the mapping of topological spaces of a woman’s body but primarily of the French style that provides a codified ‘map’ of universal courtliness. The iconic quality of the courtly heroine can be traced back to Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova, in which he delineates the proper progression of describing a woman’s body in writing that follows a geometric order: ‘Let the compass of Nature first fashion a sphere for her head; let colour of gold give a glow to her hair, and lilies bloom high on her brow. Let her eyebrows resemble in a dark beauty the blackberry, and a lovely and milk-​white path separate their twin arches’.25 Chaucer’s blazon of White draws heavily on Machaut’s depiction of the ideal courtly heroine in Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne:    Et, a brié mos, Blanche com noif, polie, de biau gros Fu sa gorge, n’i ot fronce ne os; Et s’ot biau col dont je la prise et los.    Aussi est drois Que je parle de ses bras lons et drois, Qui estoient bien fais en tous endrois; Car elle avoit blanches mains et lons dois.

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Figure 1.3  Cover of G-​Men Detective. March 1943. (Artefact from author’s private collection. Photo: Author. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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Fragility    A mon devis Avoit le sein blanc, dur, et haut assis, Pongnant, rondet, et si estoit petis, Selonc le corps, gracïeus, et faitis. (360–​71)    [And, in a few words, White as snow, smooth, pleasantly plump Was her throat, not wrinkled or bony; Her neck was beautiful, for which I prize and praise her.    It’s also fitting I speak of her arms long and straight, Which were in every way well fashioned; For her hands were white, her fingers long.    Just to my taste Were her breasts –​white, firm, and high-​seated, Pointed, round, and small enough, Suiting her body, gracious and well shaped.]26

Whiteness as a somatic marker of a woman’s ideal beauty is a standard trope whose invocation signals a writer’s participation in universal courtliness. Rather than constructing a list map for the mind’s eye, the Man in Black is more interested in plotting a map of courtliness within which he could locate himself. Another key aspect of ancient and medieval theories of memory is its associational nature. As Carruthers notes, in the Middle Ages ‘a common image for items associatively grouped in memory is that of catena or “chain” ’.27 Aristotle, in De Memoria et Reminiscentia, postulates that in the act of recollection ‘people go quickly from one thing to another, for example, from milk to white, from white to air, and from this to fluid, from which one remembers autumn, the season one is seeking’.28 Albertus Magnus, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Memoria, copies Aristotle’s mnemonic chain: The reason is that when recollecting, those who recollect come passing rapidly from one thing to another. It is as when from the memory of milk one recollects the white that is like milk in color. By white one is led to air, for the reason that white and air are in part alike, because white is a clearness that is limited and air a clearness that is unlimited. By air one is led to the moist, for the reason that the natural quality of air is moistness. By the moist one is reminded of spring, which is a warm and moist season.29

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Recollection becomes a movement along a series of imagistic associations. Albertus Magnus defines reminiscence or recollection as ‘the “tracking-​down” (investigatio) of what has been “set aside” (obliti) through and by means of the memory’.30 The word investigatio is related to vestigia, ‘tracks’ or ‘footprints’. For Aristotle, the movement along the chain of memory is necessarily causal in nature, as one image leads to another. To understand the workings of the chain of memory-​images in the Book of the Duchess, I borrow the term ‘ideoscape’, coined by Arjun Appadurai. Though Appadurai is discussing the spatialities of contemporary globalisation, his notion of ideoscapes as ‘concatenations of images’ is useful for thinking about medieval practices of space and memory.31 Since memory-​ images are conceived as both visual and spatial, recollection can also be viewed as a topological journey through ideoscapes. This is the effect of toponymy in the Book of the Duchess: from Walakye to Pruyse to Tartary; from white walls to bodily spaces to White. Chaucer’s use of the trope of whiteness in the Book of the Duchess thus invokes not only the medieval philosophical debates concerning the nature of language and signification but also the ideoscapes of the Aristotelian chain of memory. But if in recollecting one might move from milk to white to air, then the recollection of White, as performed by the Man in Black, is fundamentally problematic. Earlier in the poem, the Dreamer observes a hunt in which ‘The houndes had overshote [the hart] alle /​And were on a defaute yfalle’ (384–​5). The Middle English defaute here denotes the loss of the scent or track by the hounds in a hunt, as in ‘fallen on a defaute’.32 Like the hounds, and like Alcyone, the Man in Black also is ‘on a defaute yfalle’. For all his making of texts, he is unable to move beyond ‘white’ along the associational chain of memory that could potentially lead to consolation. Scott Westrem has observed that the Man in Black’s list of toponyms from Walakye to Pruyse to Tartary ‘lacks spatial or chronological order’ and exhibits ‘frenetic order’.33 In his discussion of Fortune’s game of chess, the Man in Black depicts his loss of White as an erroneous move on a chessboard: ‘But through that draughte I have lorn /​My blysse’ (685–​6). Having lost his lady to death, here figured through a chess move, the Man in Black no longer dares to move anywhere and clings to his spot at ‘an ook, an huge tree’ (447). Stalling and stuck at a point, he has nowhere to go.

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Writing the self elsewhere Jacob argues that the toponym is inherently subjective because it is the product of a particular view on space shaped by a particular position of the body and the gaze. In fact, it is ‘the mark of a subject of enunciation’.34 He asks: ‘What or who is this enunciator?’35 I would also add: where is the enunciating subject, the mapmaker? In the act of toponymic enunciation, the subject seeks to locate its self. ‘Where am I?’ is the first question a map viewer asks of a map.36 There is a fundamental paradox in the act of viewing a map, for the viewer is simultaneously ‘outside the map, in a real site of the world … but also inside the image’.37 If the self is the assumed centre of subjectivity, this centre is never a discernible point on the map. Confronted with the map’s image, the individual dissolves within his or her gaze and stands detached. And if the map seems to consume its viewer, it is not the same as Eurydice being swallowed up by hell, or Alcyone being absorbed by grief. The map viewer is in essence an Orphic figure who must locate his Eurydice –​where is she? –​and transport her back to where he is. Yet in Orpheus’s backward glance, she disappears and is nowhere. For Maurice Blanchot, Eurydice’s invisibility as the ‘sudden eclipse is the distant memory of Orpheus’s gaze; it is the nostalgic return to the uncertainty of the origin’.38 In the nexus between inside and outside, the map viewer qua Orpheus, like the hounds and the Man in Black, is suddenly ungrounded and falls on a defaute. Hunting, memorialising, map viewing and Orphic gazing are permutations of the same topological tracking of subjectivity, for it is only in gazing upon ‘a place where I am not, that I can become conscious of my position’.39 This is the paradox of the strange utterance by the map viewer: ‘I am here’. To fall on a defaute is to be checked by loss, to pause, to reorient and to gain one’s bearings. I am here; I am at fault. ‘I am here’, the subject enunciates in the presence of the map. ‘Here’ is a deictic word that points to the subject’s position in time and space. Historians and theorists of cartography have pointed to the shaping of individual and collective subjectivity by particular spatial and mapping practices. In the map viewer’s attempt to fashion a sense of self, Edney notes, ‘the emotion of the reading [is] not outward, through the map to the territory, but inward, through

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the map to the self’.40 Locating subjectivity is like finding one’s way in a forest, and one must start with a map, which is a metaphor for the subject.41 In the Book of the Duchess, maps embody diverse forms. In front of the map of courtliness represented by the ‘walles with colours fyne /​[that] Were peynted, bothe text and glose, /​Of al the Romaunce of the Rose’ (332–​4), the Dreamer situates himself, as well his dream, securely within the realm of the courtly. In the forest within the dreamscape, he asks a hunter ‘Who shal hunte here’ (366) to ascertain his own social position, ‘here’, in relation to the ‘emperour Octovyen’ (368). The space of ‘here’ also defines the temporality of the present, as the Man in Black affirms his loyalty to the memory of White: ‘Nay, while I am alyve her, /​I nyl foryete hir never moo’ (1124–​5). In the poem, Chaucer is not deliberately constructing a cartographic sensibility that is anachronistically Cartesian or mono-​ perspectival in nature. The medieval mappaemundi, embodying simultaneously human and salvation histories, geographical information and moral indoctrination, are not modern Cartesian maps; and the Man in Black is not literally plotting his or the Dreamer’s coordinates in space. But as Victoria Morse points out, the late Middle Ages was a time of transition and growing sophistication in European map culture; a variety of map types and hybrids coexisted. In addition to the T-​O mappaemundi, portolan charts, which were fairly accurate and used for route finding, and regional maps –​in the forms of itinerary maps, city plans and maps of properties –​were gaining in popularity and authority.42 I would like to suggest that in a poem saturated with myriad manifestations of the first-​person ‘I’, such as the Book of the Duchess, questions of subjectivity are always already questions of spatiality –​both psychically and bodily. Confronted with artefacts and fragments of the courtly, the Man in Black and the Dreamer both seek to pinpoint precisely where each of them is in relation to the virtual ideoscape of courtliness figured as the name and body of the deceased lady ‘White’. On the localisation of the subjective ‘I’ in the presence of the map, Jacob observes: ‘But no sooner than I have been assured of my position than another question emerges: what do I do in order to go elsewhere?’43 James R. Akerman similarly postulates that the map viewer wishes to answer not only the question of ‘Where am I?’ but

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also the questions of ‘Where do I want to go?’ and ‘How do I get there?’44 In his theory of subject formation, Jacques Lacan argues that the ego’s self-​recognition, its méconnaissance, is a misrecognition because the symbolic determinants of subjectivity are not to be found within the ego but elsewhere: in the unconscious and in the discourse of the Other. Jacob’s ‘going elsewhere’ is a move into the Lacanian space of the Other that symbolically determines and constitutes subjectivity and its place ‘here’: ‘[t]‌he subject is a subject only by virtue of his subjection to the field of the Other’.45 Lacan famously describes the position of the subject ‘I’: ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’.46 In other words, ‘I think where I am not’ is another name for the signifier that occupies the place above the signified, ‘I am where I do not think’. I would further add that if, for Lacan, language is a presence made of absence, then toponymy also operates in a similar fashion, for it is a fiction that gives names to places ‘whose existence must really be imagined outside language’.47 The map therefore operates as the signifier that indicates ‘where I am’ yet does not necessarily occupy the same space as ‘I am’. The figural and literal importance of space in subject formation demonstrates what Elspeth Probyn calls the ‘spatial imperative’ of subjectivity.48 Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power, theorises that subjection is paradoxically both the domination by power and the formation of the subject. Working from Althusser’s notion of the subject’s interpellation through language and from Foucault’s analysis of discursive productivity, Butler contends that subjection ‘signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject’.49 Butler revises the classic Althusserian ‘turn’ of the subject, arguing that the interpellation of the social subject is in reality not an outward turn towards ideology but a self-​ directed turn ‘back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself’.50 Crucially, the turning of the subject expresses the subject’s desire for existence, which ‘is always conferred from elsewhere’.51 Melancholia is the excess of the subject’s self-​directed subordination, for melancholia gives rise to an interiority against the exterior world, producing what Butler terms ‘psychic topographies that are clearly tropological’.52 The metaphor of mapping intrudes upon figurations of the social and the individual psyche.53

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Standing in the presence of the map, the map viewer submits to the map’s logic and power, thereby generating a stable anchoring point in space and the ground of identity.54 Thinking of subjectivity as a spatial figuration, Butler would insist on the positionality of the map viewer as ‘a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation’; the submission to map is the submission to language.55 The subject is intelligible only if and to the extent that it is already established in language, just as ‘I am here’ is possible only through the recognition of the ordering power of the map. The map orders its viewer, not the other way around. Grief is powerful and paralysing because, like language and the map, it demands the complete surrender of one’s self –​the griever submits to grief. If, as Alastair Minnis suggests, the grief of the Chaucerian narrator in the Book of the Duchess ‘is subordinated to the greater grief of his interlocutor’, it does not indicate simply the Dreamer’s subordination to the socially superior Man in Black.56 Rather, the Dreamer’s submission to the Man in Black is a self-​directed turning that engenders his subjectivity, a surrender to the logic and ordering power of courtly love expressed through language and maps.57 The collision between the Man in Black and the Dreamer at the end of the poem, when the Dreamer appears not to have realised that White is dead, moves the Dreamer out of a mode of spatialisation that seeks to pinpoint exactly where anything is. It also allows him to finally locate himself as outside of the Man in Black and his toponymic maps and outside of whiteness. Upon the Dreamer’s realisation of his outsideness as a subject, he must go elsewhere, and the dream vision ends in a flurry of abrupt movements. The hunt is over, the ‘kyng /​Gan homwarde for to ryde’ (1314–​15). Yet while the emperor returns to his castle of white walls, his home, the Man in Black goes nowhere; he’s unable to move ‘elsewhere’ beyond whiteness. Earlier in his long disquisition on White, the Man in Black claims that ‘To gete her love no ner nas he /​That woned at hom than he in Ynde; /​The formest was alway behynde’ (888–​ 90). Now he gestures towards a potential breakdown of toponymy’s usefulness and its promised appropriation of space. Whether one is at ‘hom’ or in ‘Ynde’, the ends of the world, one could never reach White, as she is beyond cartographical control. In the end, ‘White’ fails to anchor space, memory or any stable

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reference of ‘I’ because as a proper name, as a toponym, ‘White’ generates only divisions and differences, not unity or singularity. No exact identification is possible; White cannot be the home of the Man in Black. However, though the Man in Black remains within his circular economy of White, the Dreamer does return home. He awakes to find himself in bed with his book. More important, he is back at the scene of writing and speaks of his desire ‘to put this [dream into] ryme’ (1331).

Male parturitions Within the critical tradition of the Book of the Duchess, many readers have tried to pinpoint or match up the precise identifications of the Dreamer and the Man in Black, both with each other and with the historical John of Gaunt or Chaucer the poet. Michael D. Cherniss, for instance, sees the Man in Black as a surrogate for the Dreamer because both suffer from a debilitating state of mind; Minnis sees the Dreamer as the Man in Black’s foil; Cooper argues that the Man in Black is a projection of the Dreamer’s own grieving self; and for A. C. Spearing, the Man in Black stands in for both John of Gaunt and the Dreamer himself.58 Derek Pearsall, while agreeing that the Man in Black is a poetic representative of John of Gaunt, argues that Chaucer the poet ‘is not someone somewhere else manipulating the “I” for rationally explicable strategic purposes; he is the dreamer, as much and as fully as he is Chaucer’.59 Such attempts, however, do not settle conclusively the historical identities, if any, of fictive characters in Chaucer’s dream vision. In fact, the opposite occurs, as the Chaucerian male authorial consciousness, rather than identifiable, coherent and singular, is enigmatic, fragmented and in flux. Running through the poem’s reception history is a persistent construction of an elusive and fragmented white subjectivity at the centre of the Book of the Duchess. The figure of Chaucer the poet, the ‘I’, ‘metamorphoses, changes shape and identity, every time you think you have got him in focus’; the poet figure, indeed, is Morpheus who speaks through the dead body of Ceyx.60 For Travis, the Chaucerian ‘I’ signifies a divided subject whose perennially partial identity is largely the product of the incomplete identity of the object of its desire, White. The Man in Black and the Dreamer

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are ‘ “barred”, shifting and at times interchangeable signifiers of the dreamer’s multiple and subjective personae’.61 The poem’s divided and double authorial consciousness, for Elaine Hansen, is symptomatic of a masculine consciousness that is simultaneously ‘defined and recuperated by its difference and separation from the feminine and imperilled by both the woman outside and the woman inside’.62 Hansen’s emphasis on the particular maleness of the subjective ‘I’ in the Book of the Duchess has broader implications for the fractured gender identity of the presumably male poet. Chaucer the poet, Hansen notes, ‘is inevitably a figure divided against himself, unsure of his gender and how to avail himself of the putative privileges of masculinity, [and] uncertain of the grounds of his authority’.63 The divided masculinity of the poetic ‘I’ that Hansen observes can be further examined in another masculine figuration of the relationship between the poet and his work: male parturition. Authorial parturition constructs the work of art as the ‘child’ and the artist, its parent. Roland Barthes suggests that ‘[t]‌he Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’.64 In the Book of the Duchess, the Chaucerian Dreamer who self-​consciously marks himself as the one ‘that made this book’ (96) implicitly identifies with the father-​ maker. The figure of the child-​qua-​art object, however, signifies not only the work itself but also the author’s self-​conscious iterations of their younger writing selves. The child contains multitudes. Rather than engaging in another attempt to identify properly the Dreamer and the Man in Black as projections, alter-​egos, foils or historical figures, I would suggest that it might be more critically useful to consider the multiple and divided subjectivities in the Book of the Duchess as various inscribed white ‘writing selves’. Reading Henry James’s deliberate staging of his various writing selves in his Prefaces, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick focuses on his gesture ‘to figure his relation to the past as the intensely charged relationship between the author of the Prefaces and the often much younger man who wrote the novels and stories to which the Prefaces are appended –​or between either of these men and a yet younger figure who represents the fiction itself’.65 The older writer separates from and becomes in retrospect a ‘father’ to his younger self, thereby

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disrupting the temporal logic of ageing in which the older author is presumed to maintain the same identifiable, stable, unified and cohesive self as the younger man from his past. At the end of the Book of the Duchess, the Dreamer is compelled to go elsewhere, awakes, and circles back to the scene of writing. If the Man in Black were a younger version of the Dreamer himself, the Dreamer at the end of the poem too would be a different persona from that at the beginning of the poem. Like Henry James, Chaucer narrates the births of his multiple authorial selves through the making of the text itself. And through the spectral, topynymic ‘White’, male parturition is an operation of whiteness by which white* gives birth to itself; white masculinity begets more white masculinity. What does the gesture of going elsewhere but ending retro-​ futuristically in the scene of writing signify for Chaucer the poet, the mapmaker? The Orphic gaze of the map viewer liberates and permits the subject to approach the point of origin.66 However, as Doreen Massey observes, while the map allows for the retracing of footsteps, the ‘place of origin will no longer be the same’.67 Like the Man in Black, Alcyone and the hounds, the Dreamer too tracks and retraces his memory across time. When he awakes at the end, the Dreamer promises to write down his dream: ‘Thys ys so queynt a sweven /​That I wol, be processe of tyme, /​Fonde to put this sweven in ryme /​As I kan best, and that anoon’ (1330–​3). Paradoxically, the Dreamer who is going to write has always already written his work. The poem opens in the present tense, in which the Dreamer describes his melancholic insomnia, but it quickly and without any explicit signal shifts to the past tense from line 45 onward, during which the Dreamer retells the story of Alcyone and Ceyx, as well as his dream of the Man in Black. It is not until the very last line of the poem that the tense shifts unexpectedly back to the present, as the Dreamer proclaims: ‘This was my sweven; now hit ys doon’ (1334). But what precisely ‘ys doon’? The word ‘doon’ recalls the Dreamer’s persistent impatience. The very doing of writing has already been done at the beginning of the poem; the dream proper, in fact, is presented as having already happened, as a historical artefact. Barthes, theorising the death of the author, points to Proust’s technique of ‘making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write’.68 If one takes seriously the shifts of tenses in the poem, then there is a circling

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back to the present consciousness of the Dreamer at the end. Neither the reading of Ovid nor the writing of the dream has relieved his insomnia. The Dreamer, through his faulty understanding of the Man in Black, re-​enacts Orpheus’s error and returns to his ‘defaute of slep’ (5). His state of lack and loss is what Blanchot would term the ‘Orphic space’ –​the scene of writing, the space of fault.69 Just as the Dreamer splits his authorial persona into various temporal writing selves, so is the Man in Black in his recollection of White deliberately re-​creating and re-​meeting earlier versions of himself. A precocious man ‘Of the age of foure and twenty’ (455), he is quick to refer to his youth marked by an incompetence at the art of love and to his ‘yonge childly wyt’ (1095). The Man in Black confesses: ‘For hyt was in my firste youthe, /​And thoo ful lytel good y couthe, /​For al my werkes were flyttynge /​That tyme, and al my thoght varyinge’ (799–​802). Meeting White was the formative experience in his life as an artist-​lover, as he ‘made songes thus a gret del, /​Althogh [he] koude not make so wel /​Songes, ne knewe the art al’ (1159–​61).70 The result of his endeavours in love and writing, each trope standing in for the other, is his ‘firste song’ (1182), a complaint, that he proudly recites to the Dreamer (1175–​ 80) and which the Dreamer overhears upon first encountering him in the forest (475–​86). The lady White functions as a temporal divide separating the three stages of Man in Black’s artistic and erotic life: before, during and after his encounter with White herself. One of the most striking figurations of the Man in Black’s pre-​ White writing self is the metaphor of the blank tablet: Paraunter I was therto most able, As a whit wal or a table, For hit ys redy to cacche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethir so men wil portreye or peynte, Be the werkes never so queynte. (779–​84)

The white wall or tablet conjures up the traditional metaphor of memory as a writing surface. The Pseudo-​Cicero, in Rhetorica ad Herennium, claims that ‘those who have learned mnemonics can set in backgrounds what they have heard … For the backgrounds are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of images like the script, and the

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delivery is like the reading’.71 Chaucer also alludes more immediately to Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, in which the poet compares the innocence of a young lover to a white tablet: Car le droit estat d’innocence Ressamble proprement la table Blanche, polie, qui est able A recevoir, sans nul contraire; Ce qu’on y vuet peindre et pourtraire; Et est aussi comme la cire Qui sueffre dedens li escrire, Ou qui retient fourme ou empreinte, Si comme on l’a en li empreinte. (26–​34) [For the true state of innocence Properly resembles a tablet White and blank that, offering No impediment, can receive Whatever one wishes to paint or portray. And innocence is exactly like wax, Which allows one to write thereupon While retaining the image or imprint In the precise form inscribed.]72

The metaphor of the white wall or tablet, however, complicates matters of gender in the Book of the Duchess. By figuring himself as a passive receptacle or malleable matter, the Man in Black occupies the feminised position of the work of art, while White becomes Pygmalion the artist. The dead White can be read as a feminine writing self in the poem, alongside the other more obvious masculine writing selves. As the Lady, she too is an artist whose work takes the form of her male lover. White masculinity thereby originates in idealised white femininity. As a name, ‘White’ is not only proper for the deceased lady but might also be appropriate for the Man in Black. That is, the Man in Black is really the Man of/​in ‘White’; he is as much her creation as she is his. Chaucer’s strategy in the Book of the Duchess anticipates his later techniques of marking his earlier writing personae and works: in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, he is the Chaucer who ‘In youth made of Ceys and Alcione’ (II.57); in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, he is the author of ‘the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse’ (F.418); and in the Retraction, he revokes ‘the book of

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the Duchesse’ (1085). The Dreamer and the Man in Black embody multiple ‘I’s’ that exist in different temporal and spatial loci within the poem. The numerous writing selves also function collectively under the sign of the singular first-​person ‘I’, what Fradenburg calls ‘a group of one’, a seemingly coherent male authorial subjectivity produced by the groupifying power of courtliness.73 Furthermore, in the Book of Duchess, courtly groupification is an operation of whiteness. Under the sign of ‘White’, the male writing selves coalesce into ‘I’, the melancholic white subject. Courtly groupification in romance is white groupification, and it is through the groupifying power of courtliness that the ‘I’, divided and multiple, appears unified and singular.

Locating the unlost proper The Man in Black, endlessly recollecting White, engages in what Anne Carson calls the ‘economy of the unlost’, an enterprise of temporal and spatial pointing, of ‘bring[ing] the absent into the present, connect[ing] what is lost to what is here’.74 Ostensibly, the Book of the Duchess both points to and quests after an unlost ‘White’. The Man in Black confesses: ‘while I am alyve her /​I nyl foryete hir never moo’ (1124–​5). But as a proper name, ‘White’ is also deeply implicated, according to Glenn Burger, in an interplay between ‘proper naming’ and ‘deictic pronominal reference’ in the poem; that is, the Dreamer and the Man in Black can constitute their subjectivity only in terms of ‘I’ and ‘you’, in an exchange mediated by the seeming stability of ‘White’ as a proper name.75 The Dreamer’s final question to the Man in Black –​‘Where is she?’ –​might mask the true question to which he seeks the answer –​‘Where am I?’ –​ for the question of how to locate and reach White is the question of how to locate and reach the self. The ‘I’, sharing the deictic nature of ‘here’, is itself unstable yet ineradicable. More than ‘White’, what the Man in Black and the Dreamer try to remember is their self, their ‘I’ –​what is truly unlost. Or, topologically speaking, ‘I’, like ‘White’, is the invariance under homeomorphic deformations exerted by grief and mourning. The Book of the Duchess does locate ‘White’, not as a proper name embodied in a person, but as property, ‘a long castel with

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walles white, /​Be Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil’ (1318–​19). Margaret Gelling, in her study of personal names in English toponyms, notes that the list of feminine uncompounded names in Old English include Hwīte. Moreover, ‘[t]‌he stock of words used in Old English personal names includes adjectives, like hēah “high” and hwīt “white”; and this also makes for ambiguity in place-​names, as many of these adjectives could be applied to topographical features, and some, like hwīt, to buildings’.76 White, through her embodiment of the enigmatic nature of the proper name, also exhibits a similar spatial and architectural ambiguity.77 Chaucer’s puns on Richmond and Lancaster demonstrate, according to Maud Ellmann, the intimate relationship between proper names and place and property, for ‘Blanche’s name is built into the very walls that define the limits of her family’s property’.78 In the poem, Chaucer’s strategic shift from the naming of proper names to the naming of properties enacts the propensity of the toponym to claim symbolic ownership and to occupy the space it claims to name; toponym in effect is a kind of signature through its proprietary power.79 ‘White’, the quintessential proper name that is also a toponym, signifies the poem’s strategy of territorial appropriations.80 The Man in Black recalls that White ‘loved so well hir owne name’ (1018). While alive, she was marked by nominal narcissism that, in Ellmann’s analysis, is characteristic of the propriety of discourse in general. In other words, the subject’s possession of a proper name signals its submission to what is ‘proper’ to discourse; the subject’s subordination takes the form of a love for the referent of property-​qua-​propriety. Ellmann further elaborates on Blanche/​ White’s relationship to proper names, propriety and properties: In loving her own name, Blanche logically must love her namelessness, her own blancheur: it is as if the name must be erased in the perfection of its own propriety. But is it not through whiting out the name of woman that patrilineal properties must always institute themselves? Namelessness enables women to circulate between the names and properties of men. Blanche herself, as her name implies, has no intrinsic properties: she represents the currency through which names, places and properties are realigned.81

Ellmann elaborates on Gayle Rubin’s theory of the traffic in women in anthropology, contending that being trafficked means being out

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of place. Discourse, as propriety and as property, displaces the whitened (out) feminine, whose effacement is necessary to the survival of discourse. It is through her death, her literal disappearance in the Book of the Duchess, that White enables the displacements of proper names with properties. ‘White’, a proper name, exposes the homosocial competition among men over proprietary possessions. Yet ironically, neither the Dreamer nor the Man in Black is able to claim possession of the ‘long castel with walles white’ (1318); the Dreamer awakes upon the vision of the castle, while the Man in Black simply vanishes from the narrative. It is ‘this kyng’ (1314) –​ perhaps a reference to Octavian, who in turn might stand in for the historical John of Gaunt –​who ‘Gan homwarde for to ryde’ (1315) towards the castle.82 Extending the poem’s play of the proper to its broader engagement with language and signification, Ellmann suggests that White’s nominal narcissism emblematises a related yet different way to regulate property, for ‘White’ accomplishes the semiotic impossibility of the unity between the signifier and the signified, between the name and what is named. This is possible because of White’s originary effacement; she exists in the poem only through death. Ellmann’s deconstructionist reading of the poem draws on Jacques Derrida, who argues that ‘proper names are already no longer proper names, because their production is their obliteration, because the erasure and the imposition of the letter are originary’.83 The obliteration of the proper, as the play of difference, is the violence inherent to the act of writing. The collaborative memorialisation of White by the masculine writing selves in the Book of the Duchess enacts the violent making and un-​making of discourse. The parturition of white masculine subjectivity depends on feminised white death. Derrida’s theory that writing is the paradoxical co-​production and co-​obliteration of the proper, however, does not fit so easily or comfortably within medieval practices of writing and of spatialising of identities and properties. Daniel Smail has shown that, in the Middle Ages, records of landed properties almost never included visual or graphic means that produced what would be recognised today as ‘maps’ of properties or estates. Instead, the medieval mapping of the proper was accomplished almost entirely through written language. As Smail observes, ‘every one of the hundreds of thousands of property conveyances extant from medieval Europe

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included a clause identifying the location of the property by means of words alone’.84 Written lists and descriptions accomplished many functions, such as the descriptions of landed possession, that would have been handled by maps in postmedieval periods.85 The linguistic mappings of properties and identities exemplifies Sylvia Tomasch’s theory of ‘the reciprocal process of textualization and territorialization’ in the Middle Ages.86 Within what Smail identifies as vernacular linguistic cartography, the medieval city was ‘made of people and the landmarks that impinged on [the] consciousness … [and residents] used both people and landmarks in their navigational conventions’.87 Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess enacts its own vernacular linguistic cartography. While the Man in Black maps White as a collective assemblage of body parts and attributes that constitute a whole person, the Dreamer points to a landmark, such as the white castle on the hill, that looms within his dreamscape. Helge Kökeritz and Walter W. Skeat have identified the ‘walles white’ (1318) as an oblique reference to the historical Blanche, ‘Seyn Johan’ (1319) as John of Gaunt’s name-​saint, and ‘ryche hil’ (1319) as a reference to Gaunt as the earl of Richmond in Yorkshire. Skeat notes that the ‘long castel’ (1318) is Windsor Castle (191), whereas Frederick Tupper suggests that it could also allude to Yorkshire Richmond (or ‘Richemont’) that Chaucer might have visited in his life (251).88 What is significant is Chaucer’s representation of this architectural landmark as a walled castle, reflecting medieval cartography’s schematic representation of cities by walls and towers.89 P. D. A. Harvey calls the graphic representation of the city wall on maps with a bird’s-​eye view as ‘the city ideogram’.90 ‘White’ is a city ideogram and an inscription of vernacular linguistic cartography. The play of the proper within the Book of the Duchess circles back to the diverging temporal and spatial frameworks of the Dreamer and the Man in Black. Throughout the poem, the Dreamer is busy naming properties –​the bedchamber, the forest, the castle, the rich hill –​without engaging in too much naming of specific proper names (toponyms or not). On the other hand, the Man in Black is busy naming proper names, especially toponyms, without too much interest in the naming of properties. Whereas the Dreamer is the self-​declared ‘I, that made this book’ (96), the Man in Black confesses that he ‘lakketh both Englyssh and wit’

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(898).91 And while the Dreamer maps local English landed properties (Richmond, Windsor Castle), the Man in Black charts out the globalising French courtly culture. The two men, as writing selves, are namers of the proper, mapmakers, subject enunciators and memory archivists. Yet curiously, the Dreamer and the Man in Black do not name themselves, nor do they ask each other’s proper names. They can name only others in the chain of proper names: Ovid, Pythagoras, Socrates and so on and so forth. Male parturition in white results in the whitening out of white masculine identity. On the deictic gestures of proper naming, Derrida notes: ‘[I]‌t should perhaps be asked if it is any longer legitimate to refer to the pre-​ nominal “property” of pure “monstration” –​pointing at –​if pure indication, as the zero degree of language, as “sensible certitude”, is not a myth always already effaced by the play of difference’.92 The ‘here’ of proper pointing is only an illusion; there is, Butler might add, no original essence behind the proper name: pointing keeps on pointing. Within the game of naming and namelessness in the Book of the Duchess, what precisely is being pointed at behind ‘White’? A tablet? A body? A wall? A woman’s cadaver? Caught as the Dreamer and the Man in Black are in the endlessly deictic textual mirrors, it might be safer to remain nameless, or at the very least, coy about revealing too many exact names.93 At the opening of the poem, the Dreamer’s illness remains unnamed and unnameable: ‘Myselven can not telle why /​The sothe’ (34–​5); and his ‘phisicien but oon’ (39) is unnamed. The Dreamer is known simply as the ‘I, that made this book’ (96): a bookmaker is his chosen identity. Obsessed with textual production, both the Man in Black and the Dreamer can only hope that by remaining stubbornly nameless, their ‘I’ will last long enough without slipping into the all-​signifying yet all-​effacing ‘White’. Jack Halberstam has remarked that ‘to be unlost is to exist in that space between retrieval and obliteration where erasure waits on one side and something well short of salvation waits on the other side’.94 In the Book of the Duchess, the Chaucerian ‘I’, remembering, surviving and writing however mournfully, must wander to an ‘ideoscape of elsewhere’ constituted by a vernacular spatiality that is nonetheless internationally inflected –​distinct from, yet potentially equal to, the French. If the poem begins with

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a ‘map’ of courtliness defined through French-​ inspired cultural artefacts, such as the Romance of the Rose or White herself, it ends up going to the elsewhere of a white castle ‘on a ryche hil’ (1319) that cryptically gestures towards the home that is England. While the Man in Black continues his associational chain-​like mapping of a universalising French style, the grid-​oriented Dreamer anticipates a newer proto-​national mapping of reality.

White fragiliacs As Chaucer’s first major poem, the Book of the Duchess is a hybrid work steeped in the French tradition yet also grounded in its Englishness. Commenting on the English geographical practices in the Middle Ages, Kathy Lavezzo notes England’s preoccupation with its own marginal existence as a global borderland that nevertheless conferred ‘a certain social authority’ and a distinct national identity.95 In the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer enacts a parallel construction of the poem’s Englishness as paradoxically the elsewhere that is simultaneously home. What the poem ultimately asks is not ‘Where is Ceyx?’ or ‘Where is White?’ but ‘Where is the poetic “I”?’ Or perhaps, ‘Where is England?’ The Chaucerian ‘I’, remembering, surviving and writing however mournfully, must wander to an ideoscape of elsewhere constituted by a vernacular spatiality that is nonetheless internationally inflected –​distinct from, yet potentially equal to, the French. If the poem begins with a map of courtliness defined through French-​inspired cultural artefacts, such as the Romance of the Rose or White herself, it ends up going to the elsewhere of a white castle ‘on a ryche hil’ (1319) that cryptically gestures towards the home that is England. And if, as Ardis Butterfield argues, ‘English’ is an unstable and capacious (faulty?) category, it nevertheless remains unlost, for in the Book of the Duchess, ‘English’ is still in process, in the present subjective exploration of the ‘I’ that moves both towards its localisation and beyond to an elsewhere.96 Perhaps one could characterise the work of mourning in the Book of the Duchess as the economy of the un-​defaute; rather than lack and loss, it is the unlost that haunts the Dreamer and the Man in Black. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian have theorised that the

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notion of remains is inextricably linked to the notion of loss: ‘We might say that as soon as the question “What is lost?” is posed, it invariably slips into the question “What remains?” That is, loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained’.97 If loss and death constitute the foundational structure of the Book of the Duchess, it is equally true that the bodily remains of the dead will not go away: Ceyx’s corpse and that of Alcyone, and even the conjured yet already-​deceased body of White. Connor notes that despite intense abstraction, topology ‘remains fundamentally bodily’.98 The body –​like the Chaucerian ‘I’ or ‘White’ –​is the topological invariant after death. The originary intertwinement between death and the work of art is deeply imbricated with a poem in which the work of memorialisation does not move away from the corpse. The cadaver, for Blanchot, is the emblematic metaphor for the work of art, what he calls ‘the image’. Blanchot argues that within the uncanny relationship between the two, ‘the cadaver’s strangeness is perhaps also that of the image’.99 Spatially, the corpse, as the figure of the image (the work of art), exists in a nebulous space between the ‘here’ and the ‘nowhere’: ‘To be precise, this basis lacks, the place is missing, the corpse is not in its place. Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere’.100 Animated by Morpheus, the body of Ceyx is paradoxically ‘here’ in the bedchamber with Alcyone and yet forever ‘nowhere’ in the realm of the living. His corpse foreshadows the cadaver-​like body of the Man in Black whose ‘spirites wexen dede’ (489) and who ‘wax as ded as stoon’ (1300). In the enmeshed and opaque relationship between the remains of death and the spaces of art, ‘[t]‌he corpse is here, but here in its turn becomes a corpse’.101 And in this circular economy of the cadaver and the topology of ‘here’ –​mutually convertible –​there are bodies animating other bodies, invariant voices fallen on a defaute. To fall on a defaute is to lose track of the quarry and to become stuck. And being stuck, as is the case of the Man in Black, is itself a kind of spatiality. White fragility, in Robin DiAngelo’s formulation, is a reactionary politics rooted in the anxious need to protect a cocoon of racial comforts from threats of racial stress. It is

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fundamentally a spatial phenomenon: a ‘good neighbourhood’ is code for white space.102 White fragility is an insulating envelope, a home disconnected from the racial reality ‘out there’. As a spatial aspect of subjectivity, white fragility is the state of being stuck in whiteness. Where am I? Where is home? That depends on whether or not the subject ‘I’ is inside or outside of the zone of white fragility. DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility is useful in thinking through questions of subject formation inclusive of but also beyond the racial. In the Book of the Duchess, while the Man in Black is trapped in endless loops of white mourning, the Dreamer engages in what Arthur Little, channelling Anne Cheng, describes as critical white melancholic reading: denial, unmarking, self-​fashioning and self-​impoverishment.103 The two masculine writing selves in the poem suffer from white fragility, and their fragile self-​fashioning takes place through memorialisation and consolation. As reactions to perceived threats, utterances of white fragility are less like J. L. Austin’s performatives, in which saying something is doing it, and more like his ‘behabitives’, which ‘include the notion of reaction to other people’s behavior and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else’s past conduct or imminent conduct’.104 Examples of behabitives as reactionary attitudes include ‘resent’, ‘pay tribute to’, ‘criticise’ and ‘complain of’.105 The traffic between the Man in Black and the Dreamer is behabitive in nature, for the men are responding more to each other than to the hunt or even to ‘White’ herself. Like white fragility, courtly love as a form of self-​fashioning is less performative than behabitive; it is primarily a reactionary set of practices. As such, fragility is constitutive of courtliness. Just as white fragility is undergirded by a love of whiteness, courtliness is a circular, self-​perpetuating love of the courtly, what James A. Schultz terms ‘aristophilia’. Arguing against reading medieval romance through modern constructs of the hetero-​ homo sexual divide, Schultz argues that in courtly texts there are no heterosexuals or homosexuals but only ‘aristophiliacs’: ‘Courtly lovers respond to courtliness by falling in love. Courtly love takes the shape of courtliness … Courtly love is, in a very real sense, the love of courtliness’.106 I argue that the logic of white fragility exhibits a similar solipsistic love of fragility, and its practitioners

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are better understood as ‘white fragiliacs’. White fragiliacs are frequently male or coded masculine; they are also fragmented and multiple. The Man in Black and the Dreamer –​the Chaucerian ‘I’s’ –​are white fragiliacs whose subjectivity depends on articulating and reaffirming whiteness as an absent presence, the lady ‘White’, that appears to carve out a space called home but in reality exposes the fragile nature of the borders of identity, be it poetic, affective, memorial, linguistic or political. White fragiliacs are, borrowing Richard Dyer’s terms, figures of ‘extreme whiteness’ that is ‘exceptional, excessive, marked’.107 In the Book of the Duchess, the lady ‘White’ might seem extreme –​in her beauty, her body, her name and her deadliness –​but her very (non-​)existence as a courtly trope renders her ordinary because she is iterable, citational and recognisable. It is the men who are the practitioners and enforcers of extreme whiteness. The Book of the Duchess is a matrix of agglutinating but also detachable voices and bodies; there are only floating, but never fully proper or adequate, identifications of subjectivities and their associative chains. Being stuck in dead white is a form of white death, an extreme state from which the Dreamer desperately seeks escape at the end of the poem. As a white fragiliac, the Dreamer concedes that whiteness is too much to bear. Extreme whiteness, Dyer argues, leaves behind a residue that is ‘non-​particularity, the space of ordinariness’ or the mark of ‘unwhite whiteness’.108 The scene of writing to which the Dreamer returns is a residue of whiteness, a remainder of the violence of fragility and a corpse that locates itself within the topology of loss.

Notes 1 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 31.64. 2 Michel Serres, in Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. R. Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 102. 3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edn, 1987). Citations by line numbers.

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4 See, for example, David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) pp. 48–​56; Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial Monument’, in William A. Quinn (ed.), Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Shorter Poems: Basic Readings in Chaucer and His Time (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 183–​96; and Michael D. Cherniss, Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987) pp. 169–​ 91. For the reception history of the poem, see Jamie Claire Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015). 5 For a reading of ‘White’ in terms of medieval philosophy and semiotics, see Peter W. Travis, ‘White’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 1–​66. 6 Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), s.v. ‘fault’, 8(b). 7 Liz Bondi and Joyce Davidson, ‘Troubling the Place of Gender’, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), p. 338. 8 OED, s.v. ‘de-​’, 1(a), 1(ba), 1(bb) and 1(f). 9 Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15:1 (2002), 106. 10 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. R. Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 60. 11 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 44. 12 For instance, Travis, ‘White’; Glenn Burger, ‘Reading Otherwise: Recovering the Subject in the Book of the Duchess’, Exemplaria, 5:2 (1993), 325–​ 41; and Maud Ellmann, ‘Blanche’, in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), Criticism and Critical Theory (London: Arnold, 1984), pp. 105–​12. 13 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 210. 14 MED, s.v. ‘slepen’, 2(b). 15 Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), p. 5. For studies of medieval cartographical practices, see P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 464–​501; David Woodward, ‘Reality, Symbolism,

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Time and Space in Medieval World Maps’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75:4 (1985), 510–​ 21; Victoria Morse, ‘The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century’, in David Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance, vol. 3, part 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 25–​52; and Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). For the merging of Portolan charts and mappaemundi in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, see especially Morse. 16 Edson, Mapping Time and Space, p. 6. 17 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 60. See also Ruth Evans, ‘Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), 43–​69; and her ‘Our Cyborg Past: Medieval Artificial Memory as Mindware Upgrade’, postmedieval, 1:1–​2 (2010), 64–​71. 18 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 234. 19 Prose translation in B. A. Windeatt (trans.), Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 65–​70; quote on p. 69. 20 Burger, ‘Reading Otherwise’, 334. 21 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 51. 22 For classic studies of Petrarchan blazons in the early modern period, see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’, Critical Inquiry, 8:2 (1981), 265–​ 79. Vickers argues that ‘the “I” speaks his anxiety in the hope of finding repose through enunciation, of re-​membering the lost body, of effecting an inverse incarnation –​her flesh made word. At the level of the fictive experience which he describes, successes are ephemeral, and failures become a way of life’ (p. 275). 23 Connor, ‘Typologies’, 106. 24 Matthew H. Edney, ‘Mapping Empires, Mapping Bodies: Reflections on the Use and Abuse of Cartography’, Treballs de la societat Catalana de geografia, 63 (2007), 97. 25 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967), p. 36. 26 R. Barton Palmer, Yolanda Plumley, Domenic Leo and Uri Smilansky (eds and trans.), Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, Volume 1: The Debate Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), pp. 62–​3.

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27 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 62. 28 Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, trans. Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1972), p. 56. 29 Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds), The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 144. 30 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 20. 31 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-​Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 331. 32 MED, s.v. ‘defaute’, 2. See also OED, s.v. ‘defaute’, 6; ‘fault’ (n), 8(a); and ‘fault’ (v). 33 Scott D. Westrem, ‘Geography and Travel’, in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 212. 34 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 212. 35 Ibid., p. 212. 36 Ibid., p. 338. 37 Ibid., pp. 337–​8. 38 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 174. 39 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 339. 40 Edney, ‘Mapping Empires’, 98. 41 Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, ‘Mapping the Subject’, in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 13. 42 Morse, ‘Role of Maps’, pp. 30–​7. 43 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 343. 44 James R. Akerman, ‘Finding Our Way’, in James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr (eds), Maps: Find Our Place in the World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 26. 45 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–​1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 188. 46 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 166. 47 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 210. 48 Elspeth Probyn, ‘The Spatial Imperative of Subjectivity’, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds), The Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), p. 290.

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49 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 2 50 Ibid., p. 3. 51 Ibid., p. 21, my emphasis. See also Ellmann, ‘Blanche’. Ellmann asks provocatively: ‘Is there somewhere –​always elsewhere –​another Blanche, consuming the white walls of propriety in the flames of woman’s jouissance?’ (p. 109). 52 Butler, Psychic Life, p. 4. 53 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994). Bachelard relates the oneiric experience of immensity to the place of elsewhere: ‘Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of mediation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn’t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of fact, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere’ (pp. 183–​4, original emphasis). 54 Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 339. 55 Butler, Psychic Life, p. 10. 56 Alastair J. Minnis, V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith (eds), The Shorter Poems. Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 134. 57 On the formation and the function of subjectivity in the Book of the Duchess, Minnis sees the Dreamer as ‘a cohesive device in the poem’ (Shorter Poems, p. 113). In addition, the ‘I-​ persona … maintains a remarkable degree of consistency throughout the poem, and … may therefore be regarded as a source of its unity’ (p. 117). See L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Fradenburg, examining subjectivity in the broader socio-​political contexts of the late Middle Ages, views the secular discourse of courtly love as instrumental in beginning ‘to formalize and groupify an amorous experience that would dignify aristocratic subjectivity’ (p. 80); the courtly subject is essentially the aristocratic subject. Burger, in ‘Reading Otherwise’, also argues that ‘what constitutes this self is the acceptance of a codified and pre-​existent discourse of courtly love which confers “original” status and authorises the myth of an intersubjective communication capable of endless repetition without change or diminution’ (pp. 333–​4).

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58 Cherniss, Boethian Apocalypse, p. 190; Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 117; Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucer’s Self-​Fashioning’, Poetica, 55 (2001), 62; and A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 59. 59 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 84, 87, my emphasis. 60 Cooper, ‘Chaucer’s Self-​Fashioning’, 58. 61 Travis, ‘White’, 36, 45–​6. 62 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 82. 63 Ibid., p. 84. 64 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Images, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 145. 65 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel’, GLQ, 1 (1993), 7. 66 Blanchot, Space of Literature, p. 173. 67 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 125. 68 Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, p. 144. 69 Blanchot, Space of Literature, pp. 172–​3. 70 The Middle English maken also means ‘to write’. See MED, s.v. ‘maken’, 5(a). 71 Quoted in Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 28. 72 R. Barton Palmer, Yolanda Plumley, Domenic Leo and Uri Smilansky (eds and trans.), Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, Volume 2: The Boethian Poems (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), pp. 90–​3. 73 Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, pp. 99–​101. 74 Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 38. 75 Burger, ‘Reading Otherwise’, 334 n.19. 76 Margaret Gelling, Signposts to the Past: Place-​Names and the History of England (London: Dent, 1978), p. 165. 77 Gelling adds that the ‘adjectives in place-​names may be personal names or may be descriptive of the place. These factors produce nothing worse than ambiguity’ (Signposts to the Past, p. 166). For studies of medieval onomastics, see David Postles, Naming the People of England, c. 1100–​1350 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006); and Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘Names and Naming Patterns in Medieval England: An Introduction’, in David Postles and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), Studies on the Personal Name in Later Medieval England and Wales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), pp. 1–​6. Postles argues that ‘names particularly, but not exclusively,

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in the medieval period thus belonged partly to the symbolic field (the cultural world) and partly to the social order (through their meanings for kinship and spiritual kinship’ (p. 5). Moreover, by around 1350, the stabilisation of bynames into hereditary surnames (family names) in England began to take place (p. 7). 78 Ellmann, ‘Blanche’, p. 105. 79 Jacob, Sovereign Map, pp. 202–​5. 80 On the relationship between the naming of women and landed properties in the Middle Ages, David Postles observes that ‘[i]‌n the changing formulations of women’s nomina are contained the variety of cultural influences on female naming over this long term. Transitions in descriptions of women attest to the diversity of influences, and to the increasing importance of patriarchal values associated not only with males but with land and lineage’ (Naming the People of England, p. 142). 81 Ellmann, ‘Blanche’, p. 105, my emphasis. 82 One can also connect property to questions of inheritance. See Gayle Margherita, ‘Originary Fantasies and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 116–​ 41. Margherita notes: ‘In keeping with the generic preoccupations of elegy, it also deals with the question of literary inheritance: the right to mourn, as Peter Sacks points out, implies the right to inherit’ (p. 119). 83 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-​Strauss to Rousseau’, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 109. Situating the simultaneous production and destruction of the proper in writing, Derrida’s argument is a direct response to Claude Lévi-​ Strauss’s structuralism, as well as to Rousseau, to whom Lévi-​Strauss traces his lineage, that posits a seemingly universal and recoverable structure of the proper, what Derrida calls Rousseau’s ‘eschatology of the proper (prope, propius, self-​proximity, self-​presence, property, own-​ness)’ (p. 107). 84 Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 6, my emphasis. 85 Morse, ‘Roles of Maps’, p. 38. See also Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London: British Library, 1999). Delano-​Smith notes that in the Middle Ages ‘a property map [was] commonly associated with a written document’ (p. 112), and there were written descriptions of urban landscapes.

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86 Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Introduction: Medieval Geographical Desire’, in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (eds), Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 5. 87 Smail, Imaginary Cartographies, p. 14. 88 Helge Kökeritz, ‘Rhetorical Word-​ Play in Chaucer’, PMLA, 69:4 (1954), 937–​ 52; Walter W. Skeat, ‘Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: A New Identification’, Academy and Literature, 45 (1894), 191; Frederick Tupper, ‘Chaucer and Richmond’, Modern Language Notes, 31:4 (1916), 250–​ 2; and Frederick Tupper, ‘Chaucer and Lancaster’, Modern Language Notes, 32:1 (1917), 54. 89 Smail, Imaginary Cartographies, p. 2. 90 Harvey, ‘Local and Regional Cartography’, p. 476. For other discussions of the city ideogram on medieval maps, see Delano-​Smith and Kain, English Maps; Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Chorographies of Florence: The Use of City Views and City Plans in the Sixteenth Century’, Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), 41–​64; Juergen Schulz, ‘Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500’, Art Bulletin, 60:3 (1978), 425–​74; and Morse, ‘Role of Maps’, pp. 42–​3. 91 Chaucer’s Squire also confesses his lack of English: ‘Myn Englissh eek is insufficient’ (V.37). 92 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 336 n.6. 93 Burger, ‘Reading Otherwise’, notes: ‘Many readers have also tried to name the knight “properly”: as the Black Knight, or even more specifically and extra-​narratively as the mourning John of Gaunt. Yet the dreamer cannot recognise him as anything more specific than “man” or “knight”; this contrasts with his earlier naming of the Roman de la rose in his bedchamber or his conversation in the garden when he learned that the Emperor Octavian would be leading the hunt’ (334 n.19). 94 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 47. 95 Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–​1534 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 7. 96 Ardis Butterfield, ‘Nationhood’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 50–​65. 97 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The  Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 2. 98 Connor, ‘Topologies’, 106.

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99 Blanchot, Space of Literature, p. 256. 100 Ibid., p. 256. 101 Ibid., p. 256. 102 Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3:3 (2011), 58. 103 Arthur L. Little, ‘Re-​Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (2016), 91–​3; and Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 104 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 159. 105 Ibid., 159. 106 James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 172. 107 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 222. 108 Ibid., p. 223.

2 Desiring white object

And no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory Of whiteness –​Williams Carlos Williams1 They say also concerning the whiteness of spoiled pearl that it should be cast into sharp vinegar with a carat of sal-​amoniac and a grain of borax (tankār) and a grain of nitre (būrāq) and three grains of powdered Kalī, then boiled gently in an iron ladle. Then the ladle should be lifted of[f] the fire and (the pearls) plunged into cold water and rubbed with Andarānī salt and afterwards thoroughly washed with water. This is on the assumption that it peels off the upper layer of its face. –​ Al-​Biruni2

In the Middle English poem Pearl, the narrator, overcome by grief over the loss of a precious possession, falls asleep in a garden. As he enters his dream, the Dreamer self-​consciously observes a separation of his physical body and spirit. As he describes it: ‘Fro spot my spyryt then sprang in space –​/​My body on balke ther bod in sweven’ [From that spot my spirit sprang into space /​My body remained on the mound in a dream] (61–​2).3 Here, the Dreamer’s description of the apparent division of body and spirit curiously mirrors Brian Massumi’s account of the embodied experience of affect, in which the body, ‘when impinged upon … [is in a] state of passionate suspension in which it exists more outside of itself, more in the abstracted action of the impinging thing and the abstracted context of that action, than within itself’.4 The poem’s conjuration of the Dreamer’s body–​spirit divide is precisely a temporal

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figuration of a body affected. The dream vision itself, in fact, is a passionate state of suspension. As much as it is a dream vision of a bereaved narrator attempting to come to terms with his loss, Pearl is also heavily invested in articulating the dynamics of affect in the temporal and psychic worlds of the Dreamer. Rather than simply accepting the literal and figurative binarism of the body–​spirit divide, it might be productive to read the Dreamer’s ‘spirit’ as what Patricia Ticineto Clough terms a ‘ghosted body’ –​a state of nonsomatic embodiment that nonetheless retains all of the body’s capacities for affection –​for within his dream, the Dreamer persistently marks his affective conditions, such as desire, longing, pain, anger and awe. In Clough’s formulation, ghosted bodies are the detritus of erased histories of labour and production, part of ‘the disavowals constitutive of Western industrial capitalist societies’.5 ‘Ghosted’ denotes haunting, for the disavowed body of capitalism is haunted by the traumatic erasure of its history, be it slavery, settler colonialism or Fordism. But ‘ghosted’ also carries the sense of being evacuated, emptied out. The ghosted body is not so much without memory as awareness, for trauma is memory without consciousness, which manifests as body memory or cellular memory: ‘As a surfacing of a difficulty in remembering or in being certain about the truth of memory, the body becomes a memorial, a ghosted bodily matter’.6 A crisis of mnemonic and cognitive uncertainty characterises the Dreamer, who remains unsure of who or what precisely he has lost or the identity of the Maiden in front of him. In Pearl, ghosted embodiment is inseparable from whiteness, which is irreducible to a single shade but is figured by a range of tonal gradations. The Pearl Maiden has a ‘vysayge whyt as playn yuore’ [visage white as polished ivory] (178), but her garments are ‘Al blysnande whyt’ [All gleaming white] (197). As I will discuss below, ancient and medieval techniques of artificial whitening of pearls involved either peeling off or bleaching away the pearls’ natural blemishes. Yet in the poem, the labour history of pearl whitening is completely erased. A white corpse adorned with white pearls, the Pearl Maiden too has a ghosted body. The ghosting of the body, haunted by and emptied of the history of labour, is an operation whereby white* becomes whiteness. The ghosted white body is a psychic and cognitive imaginary with real material effects.

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David Katz’s experiment on colour perception, which I discussed in the Introduction, points to the imbrication of colour, memory, language and affect. Colour, in Katz’s formulation, ‘strikes’ the subjective affect and memory during perception. Yet ‘the absolute strikingness of the whiteness, blackness or hue of certain objects may have led to an exaggeration of these colour-​attributes in memory’.7 As a result, test subjects consistently failed to match the colours they had seen with the colours they had remembered. The mismatch of colours is symptomatic of the unavoidable cognitive gap in colour perception, especially for whiteness and blackness. On Katz’s experimental subject who could not match the blue of his friend’s eyes with the correct laboratory colour patch, Massumi theorises that ‘[the] affective modulation was as effectively conditioning of the memory-​colour’s emergence as the objective properties of the light that might be scientifically confirmed as have been reflected by the friend’s retina’.8 Figuratively, and perhaps literally for the body affected, memory is coloured as it forms. Upon recollection, the remembered colour of an object includes the object’s actual colour plus something else. And the excess, which does not exist in the real world except in the memory of the subject, is the scar inscribed by colour’s affection; colour’s absolute power to wound is ‘as unwilled as it is unmatched by its human hosts’.9 In Pearl, the absolute strikingness of the Maiden’s whiteness intensifies the Dreamer’s affect and memory. As he fixes his gaze upon her, the Dreamer claims that he knows ‘hyr more and more’ (168). Yet the more-​ness that the Dreamer articulates is nothing but his exaggerated memory of the lost pearl’s former whiteness. That is, the Dreamer’s claim of knowing the Pearl Maiden ‘more and more’ signals his having remembered her too brightly and too deeply. The exaggeration of colour in subjective memory is a form of colour intensification. As D. Vance Smith argues, whiteness in Pearl is not simply a colour but a state of intensification, and ‘[t]‌his figure of intensified whiteness is also a body of death, the pale corpse of the girl presumably named Pearl whom the dreamer is mourning at the beginning of the poem’.10 And as George Edmondson argues, mourning is the most affecting feature of Pearl, which ‘mourns, awkwardly, movingly, the trauma of being in language’.11 I would further suggest that the work of mourning in Pearl, haunted by

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both loss and desire, is figured as an affective labour that the poem engages in, so that mourning registers as an affective impingement upon the body that works productively to stall time. As the Dreamer laments the loss of his pearl, his ‘wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte’ [wretched will in woe always struggled] (56). The work of mourning, in fact, becomes a narcissistic act in which the Dreamer–​ mourner, like the Man in Black in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, is unable to move beyond the lost object of desire, refuses consolation and perpetuates a seemingly endless replay of loss and denial. Mourning, in other words, is the work of fragilisation. Drawing on thing studies, spectrality, material culture and affect theory, the chapter examines Pearl’s persistent blurring of the Pearl Maiden’s spectral body and the material pearl as an object under affection. Resisting reading the Maiden solely in terms of religious and psychic metaphors, I argue that the material status of the ‘perle’ –​ white, luminous, costly, even exotic –​is key to understanding the poem’s engagement with the socio-​economic changes in the late Middle Ages. Whiteness, as materialised in the Maiden’s body and clothes, is an object biography of the emerging spirituality of the urban middling classes, exemplified in the figure of the Dreamer–​ Jeweller. Next, I draw on the psychoanalytic works of Lacan and Žižek to examine the affective labour of mourning and the play of proximity and distance between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden. In her function as the Lady–​Object, or the Lacanian object a, the Pearl Maiden both attracts the Dreamer and keeps him at a distance across the stream. The stream as a dividing line also serves to frame the visual centre of the dream vision: the New Jerusalem. Deploying Derrida’s notion of the parergon and ergon in a work of art, I argue that the poem maintains but also blurs the distinction between the frame and the centre. But if distance is crucial to the poem’s affective labour of mourning, then the presence of whiteness complicates desire’s play of proximity. In whiteness, the distinctions between the parergon and the ergon do not exist; yet paradoxically, whiteness also marks the simultaneity of the spatial and temporal binaries at work in the poem. Like the shimmering whiteness of the Pearl Maiden, consolation is offered yet denied to the Dreamer, who remains in mourning. Kept at a distance, the Dreamer is doomed to circle

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endlessly around what George Edmondson calls the ‘traumatic punctum’ in the poem.12 At the heart of the New Jerusalem that the Dreamer witnesses is the white Lamb of God, which, in terms of linear perspective, is the visual centric point within the poem. And at the centre of the Lamb’s whiteness is a bleeding wound from which the stream in the dream vision originates. As such, the punctum at the centre of whiteness is a sign of the Dreamer’s trauma and of the woundedness of desire itself. The point –​as a prick, a puncture –​remains intertwined with the materiality of the object, manifest as the fleshy residue of desire’s wound. In the penultimate section, I focus on the poem’s deliberate silence over the physical whitening of pearls, which are almost never naturally white when harvested. The Maiden, as a literal and figurative object filled with affect, embodies the object’s concealment of its history of labour. Pearl’s whiteness, therefore, is both a marker of human artifice and an erasure of its history of production. And this temporal erasure precipitates in the Dreamer’s inability to move beyond mourning. Finally, I argue that white fragilisation is the process by which the normativity of whiteness congeals into cultural praxes as states of paralysis.

The spectral object Pearl’s affective labour of mourning is also a labour of conjuration, for the Pearl Maiden appears, ghost-​like, in the Dreamer’s vision. As the Dreamer discovers the Pearl Maiden at the foot of a cliff, he expresses his astonishment at the apparition before him: ‘Thenne veres ho up her fayre frount, /​Hyr vysage whyt as playn yvore, /​ That stonge myn hert ful stray astoung’ [Then raises she her fair forehead, /​Her visage white as polished ivory, /​That my heart is dazed in bewilderment] (177–​9). Yet like the Dreamer’s ‘goste’ (63), the Maiden too is no mere phantom; within the dream vision, she is both literally and figuratively an embodied loss, a ‘melancholic materialization’.13 What is important here, in terms of body and affect, is the poem’s persistent blurring of the Maiden’s body and the material pearl as an object, a thing.14 While the Dreamer addresses the Maiden as ‘that worthy creature’ (494), he also refers to her as ‘that precious thing’ (14), his ‘precious pyece’ (192) and

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the ‘spotless pearl’ (745). The ambiguity over the nature and significance of the ‘perle’ has lent itself to metaphoric or metonymic readings of the Maiden as an allegorical symbol and a linguistic sign.15 While the poem does engage in plays of signification –​of différance –​the significance of the Pearl Maiden resides not only in her status as a metaphor. One must also take seriously the poem’s stubborn assertion that the pearl is both the object/​thing and the Maiden. As Sarah Stanbury observes, foregrounding the key roles of materiality and presence in the poem, ‘the pearl is a pearl’.16 The late twentieth-​and early twentieth-​first-​century critical turn to things and thingness has provided a productive theoretical lens for reading the poem’s play of affects through the body.17 The material turn examines not only inanimate objects but also animate bodies. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty has pointed out that ‘the body is a thing among things’.18 In my reading of Pearl, I would like to examine the very nexus of the body, thingness, and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. Things, as Bill Brown argues, possess a spectral power that ‘organize[s]‌our private and public affection’.19 Indeed, the lost pearl, through its temporal haunting of the Dreamer’s body and consciousness, exhibits such powers of affective control as it creates in the Dreamer ‘A deuely dele’ [a desolating grief] (51). Derrida, in his reading of the work of spectral conjurations in both Marx and contemporary Marxism, argues that the production of a ghost is a ‘paradoxical incorporation’.20 For Derrida, the ghost has a body, though a more abstract one than that of flesh. In the production of a ghost, incorporation occurs ‘not by returning to the living body … [but] by incarnating … in another artefactual body, prosthetic body’; the artefactual body of the ghost is a ‘second ghost’.21 It is therefore not surprising that, in Pearl, the Pearl Maiden is characterised by an ontological ambiguity and complexity that insists on the merging of the body and the thing. Put another way, the Maiden (along with all her luxurious accoutrements of fancy clothes and pearls), functions as a talking commodity-​thing. Derrida, speaking of the transfiguration of Marx’s table from wood to commodity fetish, argues that the table ‘becomes someone, it assumes a figure’.22 In a similar fashion, the Pearl Maiden also undergoes a transfiguration from the material pearl to a talking woman, what Žižek would call the ‘Lady–​Object’. The Maiden speaks to the Dreamer ‘in wommon

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lore’ [in woman’s counsel] (235–​6), ‘And jueles wern hyr gentyl sawes’ [and her gentle words were jewels] (278). The most visible characterisation of the Pearl Maiden is her whiteness. The Dreamer speaks of ‘Her ble more blaght then whalles bone’ [Her complexion that was whiter than whale’s bone] (212), ‘Hyr vysayge whyt as playn yvore’ [Her visage white as polished ivory] (178), and that ‘Al blysnande whyt was hyr beau biys’ [All gleaming white was her beautiful garment] (197). Whiteness in Pearl is frequently negatively marked, for both the pearl and the Maiden are ‘moteless’ [spotless] (961). Critics, in their interpretations of Pearl’s whiteness, have pointed to hagiographic iconography and theological tradition. The white pearl symbolises virginity, purity and spiritual salvation.23 James W. Earl suggests that the Pearl Maiden is possibly modelled after St Margaret; in French, the word for pearl is marguerite.24 In the hagiographical tradition, St Margaret is emphatically characterised by her whiteness and virginity, as well as her affinity to the pearl. In Caxton’s translation of Jacopo de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, ‘Margarete is sayd of a precyous gemme or ouche that is named margaryte, whyche gemme is whyte, lytyll, & vertuous. So the blessyd margarete was whithe by virgynite’.25 Just as St Margaret is ‘whithe by virgynite’ (candida per virginitatem), the Pearl Maiden, in all her white splendour, is one of the heavenly queens ‘coronde clene in vergynté’ (767) and the bride of Christ.26 Beyond whiteness as the colour of Christian salvation, it is the persistent attention to the notional value of whiteness that constitutes its polyvalent discourse in Pearl. Not only is whiteness a sign of spiritual purity, it is also materialised in garments and jewellery that can be appraised, exchanged and circulated. As such, Pearl can be read as an object biography of whiteness, since materiality cannot be ignored in studies of abstract valuation and constructs. Janet Hoskins argues that ‘people and things they [value are] so complexly intertwined they could not be disentangled’.27 Moving through time and space –​producing histories and meanings –​ objects, like the people with whom they come into contact, are rich in what Igor Kopytoff calls ‘biographical possibilities’.28 Kopytoff further suggests that different kinds of object biography are possible. One could, for example, investigate the history of the production of a particular object; its biography would be a technical

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one. But what Kopytoff is especially interested in is what he calls the ‘cultural biography’ of a thing, which recognises that the object is a ‘culturally constructed entity’, invested with ‘culturally specific meanings’ and is ‘classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories’.29 Or, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s terms, an object is ‘a temporal archive, a repository for multiple pasts and a trigger for unanticipated futures’.30 What the object biography of whiteness in Pearl inscribes is the changing spiritual and economic culture of the late Middle Ages. Lester Little has noted a shift from gift economy to profit economy and the emergence of a medieval urban culture. Concomitant with these changes was ‘the problem of the spiritual crisis … in terms of a disjuncture between socio-​economic change and resistance to adaptation’.31 In Pearl, the Dreamer is identified as a jeweller whose loss of a priceless gem is emblematic of the spiritual crisis in the late Middle Ages. Little also notes that as a response, the medieval Church formulated an urban spirituality, a Christian ethic that justified the activities of merchants and other urban professionals. The new theology is at work in Pearl, as the poet both stresses the maiden’s value as a ‘precious pyece’ (192) who has ‘earned her penny’ (614) in heaven and uses a mercantile language to highlight the necessity of ‘buying’ spiritual pearls, hence conflating the spiritual with the marketplace. Jewels in the Middle Ages were both aesthetic and functional objects, symbols of aristocratic standing and taste, and tokens in networks of power and exchange.32 The dazzling clothing and jewellery of the Pearl Maiden mark not only the Maiden’s spiritual purity but the Dreamer’s self-​ conscious trafficking in symbolic objects of class and power. Whiteness, as produced and circulated in Pearl, is both a symbolic medium of personal salvation and a concrete object that emblematises and normalises the emerging proto-​capitalist spirituality of the medieval city. At the heart of Pearl is the Parable of the Vineyard, which is not so much told by the Maiden as conjured up by her, for the story is a Christian commonplace for the poem’s audience –​despite the Dreamer’s apparent ignorance of it. In the context of late medieval economic changes, the poem’s retelling of the Parable further alludes to the late medieval secularisation and organisation of work time into fixed hours and measured units of the day, as

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the labourers in the parable agree to the wages of ‘a pené on a day’ (510). Historically, the late Middle Ages witnessed growing attempts –​stipulated in parliamentary statues and guild regulations, as well as allegorised in literary works such as Piers Plowman –​to structure the working day for artisans and labourers.33 As Chris Humphrey suggests, ‘the complaint was that these groups wasted much of their day and did not deserve their wages’.34 The agricultural context of the parable might therefore seem an odd one for instructing the presumably urban Dreamer–​Jeweller. Yet what is significant is the parable’s primary focus on labour and sociality.35 The spectralisation of the commodity-​thing, Derrida argues, always reveals a double social bond that marks both the relation among commodity-​things themselves and the association of men to each other, men who are associated with ‘the time or the duration of labour’.36 Therefore, the parable is important in Pearl not so much because of the issues of physical labour and fair wages, of contracts and the lord’s rights, or of spiritual labour and heavenly rewards. Rather, the significance of the parable lies in its marking of the centrality of affective labour; that is, the fact that the body’s engagement in labour is always affective in nature. What the parable highlights is not simply idle bodies versus labouring bodies but affect-​filled bodies that also expend energy to complain about their treatment. When, for instance, the landlord pays all labourers ‘a penny for a day’, those who have worked the longest ‘bygonne to pleny’ (549) over the perceived loss of their physical labour and financial inequality (551–​6). The parable thus works to establish parallels between the workers’ affective labour of complaint and the Dreamer’s affective work of mourning. What does mourning produce besides itself? Can consolation be valued? The parable further gestures towards the body –​be it that of the labourers’ or of the Dreamer’s –​as the site of affective potential. Bodies –​idling, labouring, complaining and mourning –​are the signifiers and media through which affects move and accrue value.

Framing desire Affective labour, according to Michael Hardt, is ‘the production and manipulation of affects [that] requires (virtual or actual)

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human contact and proximity’.37 Throughout Pearl, the play between proximity and remoteness, both literal and figurative, is foregrounded with the staging of the stream that both tantalisingly provokes and permanently divides the Dreamer from his desire, as well as the Dreamer’s constant awareness of spatial markers such as distance and perspective. In his initial encounter with the Pearl Maiden, the Dreamer observes that ‘At the fote therof there sete a faunt, /​A mayden of menske ful debonere’ [a child sat at the foot of the cliff, /​A maid of courtesy full gracious] (161–​2). And as the Maiden draws close to him ‘doun the schore’ (230), the Dreamer becomes ravished by the sight of his lost object. The physical, psychological and allegorical distance between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden is something built into the very relationship between the Dreamer and the Maiden –​one that borrows heavily from the language and convention of courtly love.38 The medieval discourse of courtly love constructs the object of one’s desire as always already situated elsewhere: anywhere but ‘here’ with the lover. Obstacles of temporal and spatial distance are coextensive with promises of fulfilment. With obstacles embedded within, courtly love insists on the ultimate unobtainability of the object. Itself a form of affective labour, courtly love is the work of mourning, relishing and perpetuating the unobtainable. Courtly desire, in fact, is the desire to economise desire –​quantifying, speculating and protracting it –​into a seemingly endless deferral of consummation. Longing is a projection of desire and a spatialisation of the psyche. The complexity of the Pearl Maiden resides not simply in her status as the lost object or being but in her function as the Žižekian Lady–​Object. As such, the Pearl Maiden is not strictly or necessarily the lost object itself but rather has assumed its place; a substitution has taken place within the psyche of the Dreamer. In her interactions with the Dreamer, the Maiden functions as what Lacan terms the object a, whose relationship to the mourning subject alters with changes in the distance between them. At a remote distance, the object a appears as something missing in the subject; but up close, it functions as something that covers up the originary trauma which had engendered subjectivity in the first place. The covering up of trauma is the subject’s affective labour of desire. As Joan Copjec argues,

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Fragility When we are at some remove from it, the extimate object a appears as a lost part of ourselves, whose absence prevents us from becoming whole; it is then that it functions as the object-​cause of our desire. But when our distance from it is reduced, it no longer appears as a partial object, but –​on the contrary –​as a complete body, an almost exact double of our own, except for the fact that this double is endowed with the object that we sacrificed in order to become a subject.39

When the Dreamer first encounters the Pearl Maiden from afar, his confidence that the figure before him is the very thing that he has lost overwhelms him: ‘I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere … On lenghe I loked to hyr there, /​The lenger, I knew hyr more and more’ [I knew her well, I had seen her before … For a long time I looked at her, /​The longer, the more I knew her] (164–​8). The Pearl Maiden, whose presence holds forth the promise of the Dreamer’s becoming whole, is the object-​cause of his desire. In his Lacanian reading of the poem, Edmondson contends that the symbolic order in which the Dreamer operates is identified with the pleasure principle, whose function is ‘to maintain the subject at a certain distance from the traumatic jouissance of the lost, impossible, material Thing’.40 To the Dreamer, the Pearl Maiden is the traumatic jouissance materialised and personified. And if she had any labour to perform, it would be that of engendering pleasure in the Dreamer while keeping him at a safe distance from ever reaching her. However, when the necessary distance maintained by the pleasure principle breaks down, the object a no longer appears to the subject as the lost object but as an uncanny double. When the Pearl Maiden moves closer to the edge of the river that divides her from the Dreamer, the Dreamer’s certitude gives way to doubt. Only a moment ago, he insisted that ‘Ho was me nerre then aunte or nece’ [She was nearer to me than aunt or niece] (233). Now the Dreamer tentatively inquires of the Maiden: ‘Art thou my perle that I haf playned, /​Regretted by myn one on nyghte?’ [Art thou my pearl that I have mourned, /​Grieved by me alone on night?] (242–​3). If, from afar, the Maiden appears as an embodied being of the enigmatic object lost by the Dreamer, up close she is quickly (re)converted through the collapse of distance back into a metonymic object. As the separation between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden shrinks, he is no longer interested in her as merely a fully embodied,

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speaking being, but as the bearer of a large white pearl upon her breast: ‘a wonder perle wythouten wemme /​Inmyddes hyr breste was sette so sure’ [a wondrous pearl without blemish /​Within the middle of her breast was set so sure] (221–​2). The Pearl Maiden’s ontological identity vacillates between a figurative persona and a material object, and her vacillation reflects her psychic function as the Lady–​Object. Edmondson further contends that the Maiden, as the Lady–​Object, both stands in the place of the desired thing, as evident in her continuous gesturing towards jouissance, and stands in the way of the thing, as shown in her endless deferring of the Dreamer’s ever encountering jouissance. Yet as a courtly lady, the Maiden nonetheless allows for the double fantasy in which the Dreamer-​lover does find the lost thing and access it.41 The illusion is the effect of desire’s spatial differentiations. Or, in Edmondson’s formulation, desire is structured as ‘a restless movement from signifier to signifier … in avoidance of any traumatic confrontation with lack’.42 Desire’s traffic in signifiers in Pearl necessarily entails the play of distance among signs. Specifically, Edmondson reads the ‘perle’ as Lacan’s S (Ø), ‘a symbol pronounced as “S, barred-​O” and variously interpreted to read “the signifier of the Other’s desire” or, alternatively, “the signifier of the lack in the Other” ’.43 I would contend that if ‘perle’ is the Lacanian S (Ø), then the whiteness of ‘perle’ is the sign that allows for its marking of jouissance. In other words, whiteness is the attribute ‘wythouten wemme’ [without blemish] of the pearl that is set within the Pearl Maiden’s breast. Whiteness is the lack, the (Ø), within the Maiden as the Other. Readers, such as Michael D. Cherniss and V. E. Watts, have argued that Pearl is modelled after Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and the Pearl–​poet self-​consciously participates in a popular medieval literary tradition that actively responds to and freely appropriates Boethius’s text. The Dreamer is a Boethius-​figure in need of consolation, while the Pearl Maiden assumes the role of Lady Philosophy, the consoler.44 Blending Stoicism, Platonism and Christianity, Boethian consolation functions as courtly display and as a means of reassessing the self and its beliefs and values. Of particular interest is the importance of spatiality, especially distance, in the Consolation. Stoicism provides a programme of consolation that requires ‘the distancing of the “victim” from the cause of the upset as a necessary prequel to re-​establishing their psychological

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well-​being … It [is] distance that enable[s]‌the subject to get things into perspective’.45 In contrast to the dejected subject’s initial isolation and confinement, the feminine consoler’s offer of proper perspective, through dialogue, is in essence a mental remapping and a spatial shifting of the consoled’s subject position. The necessary maintenance of a proper distance for consolation would find its scientific and theological parallel in the works of the thirteenth-​century Franciscan Roger Bacon. In his Perspectiva, Bacon constructs a perceptual analogy between physical vision and spiritual vision: And just as moderate distance of the [visible] object is required for vision of that object (thus the object must be viewed neither from an excessive nor from an insufficient distance), so the same thing is required spiritually, for remoteness from God through infidelity and a multitude of sins destroys spiritual vision, as do the presumption of excessive familiarity with the divine and the [overly bold] investigation of divine majesty.46

While Bacon is not directly concerned with the possibility of consolation for the Christian subject, he insists that without moderate distance (distantia temperata), human perception of the natural and the spiritual worlds cannot take place. And without proper perception, Bacon implicitly argues, consolation is impossible. The volatile and vacillating distance between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden in Pearl continuously thwarts any attempt by the Dreamer to delimit and anchor a stable perception of the Maiden. What or who is she? The Dreamer’s failure to maintain a moderate distance necessary to perception thereby precipitates his persistent failure to understand the Pearl Maiden’s spiritual guidance and direction towards God. She sharply admonishes his stagnant state of mourning and his perceptual limitation: ‘Stynst of thy strot and fyne to flyte /​And sech Hys blythe, ful swefte and swythe; /​Thy prayer may Hys pyté byte /​That mercy schal hyr craftes kythe’ [Stop thy complaining and quit wrangling /​And seek His mercy swiftly and earnestly; /​Thy prayer may penetrate His pity /​So that mercy shall show her powers] (353–​6). The literal and figurative divide between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden is marked by both an excessive distance and an insufficient distance. But in the poem, there is a Lacanian inversion of the correspondence between distance and familiarity espoused by Bacon. It is from afar that

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the Dreamer presumes an excessive familiarity with the divine Maiden, whereas up close, he suffers a cognitive remoteness from her. Reaching or maintaining a proper distance is elusive and phantasmagorical, or impossible to realise at all. Even at the end of the poem, the Dreamer’s perceptual wobbling keeps him in the affective state of mourning; consolation forever eludes him. The moderate distance indispensable to physical and spiritual vision that Bacon advocates is not only necessary to the unbridgeable divide between Dreamer and Maiden; it is also critical in the Dreamer’s visual-​spatial relationship to the New Jerusalem in the final section of the poem. Distance no longer functions to demarcate the psychic divide between the Pearl Maiden and the Dreamer; it now serves as the necessary frame to perspectival vision. Sarah Stanbury has argued that as the Dreamer walks alongside the Maiden towards the Heavenly City, his ‘emotional and visual frameworks immediately appear to be radically altered. [And as] he describes the City, not only are his physical senses suspended, at least at first, but he is also bodily at a remove from the object of vision’.47 After much anticipation and delay, the New Jerusalem finally makes its first appearance in the poem as the Dreamer climbs a hill and sees the heavenly sight. It is only then the Dreamer realises that the source of the splendours in the Earthly Paradise is in the Heavenly City. To him, the physical City is not a point of departure for spiritual contemplation but an observable fact. He seeks to move away from a purely exegetical reading of space, one favoured by the Maiden, and desires a physical experience of space. The New Jerusalem he sees is a solid structure with walls and foundations (991–​3).48 The concrete narrative topography is marked by two clearly demarcated regions separated by the stream. Whereas the Dreamer is confined within the Earthly Paradise, the Maiden and the New Jerusalem occupy the space ‘byyonde that myry mere’ [beyond that pleasant water] (158). Spatially, the visual centre of the last third of Pearl is dominated by the Maiden and the New Jerusalem; the Dreamer, on the other hand, is relegated to the marginal zone defined by the stream. Even while she is mediating the vision of the Heavenly City for the Dreamer, the Maiden is marginalising him: ‘Vtwyth to se that clene cloystor /​Thou may, bot inwyth not a fote’ [You may see that pure City from without,

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but you may not enter within] (969–​70). As the Dreamer follows the stream to its source, she walks opposite him on the other bank of the rivulet (975), reinforcing the boundary between the centre and the margin. The marginality of the Dreamer in Pearl has a visual resonance in the spatialisation of the figure of St John in many illustrated Apocalypses from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some manuscripts, John is placed on one side of the page and is associated with the frame. For instance, on folio 25v of Cambridge, MS R.16.2 (the ‘Trinity Apocalypse’), St John stands at the lower left corner of the margin, far away from the central square which contains images of God, the Lamb and the River of Life. St John’s position in the image marks his status as a dreamer-​visionary-​author. And on folio 2 of British Library, MS Harley 4972, a maiden with a white dress and a golden crown faces St John across a stream-​like cloud: she at the top centre of the picture, John in the left margin. In this image, the stream-​like cloud functions as an internal boundary within the picture, effectively separating John from the maiden.49 As a marginalising border to the vision of the New Jerusalem at the centre, the stream can be understood as what Derrida calls a parergon, a frame to a picture at the centre.50 Arguably the decorative, the ornamental, the external and extrinsic edge, the marginalia, the encircling frame, for Derrida, ‘the parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field’.51 It is the Other to the main work, the ergon (the self), and what the ergon must not become. In contradistinction, the parergon is a means of self-​demarcation and self-​definition by the ergon. The stream separating the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden in Pearl can be read as the parergon to the ergon, the vision of the New Jerusalem. Psychoanalytically, the stream is the image of the taboo (Law) against access to the jouissance of the Thing.52 That is, the stream as the parergon –​like the whiteness of the pearl –​is the (Ø), the lack in the Other; and the New Jerusalem, the Lacanian ‘S’. From the vantage point of the Dreamer, the stream and the City, both of which have substituted for ‘perle’, are now the S (Ø). Furthermore, the Dreamer’s association with the stream renders him a part of the periphery. Though confronted by the centre in all its power and glory, the Dreamer remains locked within the margin. Parergonally

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Figure 2.1  The woman clothed with the sun. British Library, MS Harley 4972, fol. 21r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

speaking, he is a constitutive element of the marginalia. Crucially, his position of marginality also allows for a new kind of vision, one in which the frame makes the picture. The margin in medieval art is often the realm of fantasy and subversion. Elizabeth Salter, in her study of the connection between the visual and verbal arts in the Middle Ages, comments that fourteenth-​ century illuminators often utilised the margin as a place of artistic experimentation, and the border was frequently given a greater focus denied to the picture at the centre.53

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However, the contrast between the margin (parergon) and the centre (ergon) often creates problems of spatial and visual unity and coherence. As Salter observes, ‘it is not uncommon to find sharp differences of viewpoint, scale and perspective, with margin and main subject unrelated, in spatial terms, to each other, and to the flat surface of the page of text’.54 While Salter conceives of the margin as emphatically separate from the centre, Derrida sees the centre as dependent on the margin existentially and epistemologically; the margin is the source of the centre’s seemingly natural independence and completeness. Not only are the parergon and the ergon intimately linked, they are also difficult to distinguish from each another.55 Because he recognises the sometimes-​ impossible task of separating what is essential from what is merely accessory, Derrida conceives of the parergon as ‘a hybrid of outside and inside’.56 It is precisely the hybridity of the parergon that the stream exhibits in Pearl. The stream, appearing as a spatialising frame surrounding the New Jerusalem, is integrally connected to the centre of the vision. Yet its source is located within the Heavenly City, at the centre of which the wound of the Lamb pours forth an endless torrent of blood (1135–​7). As both the blood of the Lamb and heavenly water, the stream necessarily exists within and without the New Jerusalem. The blurring of the border between the parergon and the ergon also marks the cross-​contamination of the two spaces. Or, in Derridean terms, there is parasitisation from the outside to the inside, and from the inside to the outside.57 The seepage between the ergon and the parergon exposes a fundamental spatial paradox in Pearl. If the parergon contains attributes of the ergon, and if the ergon, those of the parergon, then what are the criteria for determining or measuring direction, proximity or remoteness? If desire, as a form of affective labour, is a play of distance, then how far is far enough? Perhaps it is more accurate to describe the Dreamer’s shifting perceptions of the Pearl Maiden as the disorientating effects of desire itself; he himself is forever uncertain of his own coordinates. Just when he thinks the Pearl Maiden is too far, she looms right in front of him; and when he believes he can finally gain access to her, she disappears into a procession of virgins (1096). The parergon, as the frame around the ergon, functions as a barrier to those who seek direct access to the ergon. As such, the

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parergon is paradoxically both the path and the obstacle. The way into the centre of desire is through the necessary path of the frame: a detour. Žižek has argued that the Lady–​Object ‘functions as a kind of “black hole” around which the subject’s desire is structured. The space of desire is bent like space in the theory of relativity; the only way to reach the Object-​Lady is indirectly, in a devious, meandering way’.58 On the circumlocution of desire’s movement, Lacan theorises that ‘[t]‌he detour in the psyche isn’t always designed to regulate the commerce between whatever is organized in the domain of the pleasure principle and whatever presents itself as the structure of reality … The techniques involved in courtly love … are techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus’.59 The lover’s necessary holding back preserves the proper distance between him and the object a, allowing it to continue to function as the cause of his desire. The Pearl Maiden ostensibly functions as Lady Philosophy, but she is also Lady Fortune who relentlessly interrupts the Dreamer and forbids his direct perception of and access to her. What the Pearl Maiden allows is only an oblique glance from the parergon, effecting what Lacan analyses as the anamorphosis of courtly love. In Žižek’s reading of Lacan, spatial anamorphosis indulges the Object to be viewed only ‘from the side, in a partial, distorted form, as its own shadow’.60 Extending Lacan’s argument, Žižek’s argues for an analogous anamorphosis of time, in which ‘the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its absent point of reference. The Object, therefore, is literally something that is created –​whose place is encircled –​through a network of detours, approximations and near-​misses’.61 When Lacan describes the techniques of courtly love as those of holding back, suspension and amor interruptus, he has in mind the psychology of obstacle that is built into courtly love. In Pearl, the Dreamer’s endless encircling around the prohibited yet desired Lady–​ Object condemns him to remain in a state of uncertainty –​he is uncertain of the quantifiability of mourning in time, as well as the proper distance between himself and the Pearl Maiden. Bedazzled by the resplendent Pearl Maiden and the New Jerusalem, the Dreamer moves close to the vortex of whiteness. But he can only hover and remain suspended between affinity and remoteness, between the parergon and the ergon.

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Into the vanishing point When Edmondson refers to the Dreamer’s restless circling around the ‘traumatic punctum of the Other’s desire’ (61), he also gestures towards the long history of the point (punctum) in Western thought.62 The Middle English poynt denotes a ‘small dot marked on a surface’; a ‘small amount, the smallest part; the least bit’; ‘a point in space, a place, spot, location’; ‘a brief period of time, an instant, a moment’.63 The point is spatial and temporal, and it is both a unit of measurement and a physical mark impressed upon the material world. The point signifies and quantifies. Augustine, in his De Quantitate Animae, offers a theory of beauty based on geometric regularity. Whereas equilateral triangles are more beautiful than scalene triangles because of their evenness, squares are even more beautiful. As Umberto Eco explains, for Augustine, the circle is the most beautiful because it ‘has no angles to disrupt the continuous equality of its circumference. Above all of these, however, is the point –​indivisible, centre and beginning and end of itself, the generating point of the circle, the most beautiful of all figures’.64 God, Augustine theorises, is the generating centre of all things; and because God, and nothing else, possesses the highest beauty in the world, the point is the most beautiful. In late medieval Christian mystical tradition, the point plays a crucial role in the mystics’ ecstatic moment of union with the divine. Richard Rolle refers to ‘a lityll poynt of … joy’, a point of ‘infenit swetnes’ so vast that to speak of it would be like taking ‘þe see be drope and spar it all in a lityll hole of þe erth’ [the sea drop by drop and squeezing it all into a little hole in the earth].65 Julian of Norwich professes to have seen God in a point: ‘I saw god in a poynte, that is to say in my vnderstandyng, by which syght I saw that he is in althyng’.66 Julian’s ‘poynte’ is dimensionless yet pan-​ dimensional, as God reveals Himself in ‘althyng’ and in a ‘poynte’. Elsewhere in her writing, Julian uses ‘poynte’ in the temporal sense as ‘an instant’ or ‘the brink’ of an event: ‘And also god wylle that whyle the soule is in the body, it seem to itself þat it is evyr at þe poynte to be takyn. For alle this lyfe and thys longyng that we haue here is but a poynt, and when we be takyn sodenly out of payne in to blesse, than payn shall be nought’.67 As a visionary mode and the

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centre of reality, the point represents the smallest unit of time and space, while effecting an erasure of all dividing space or mediating time. To see God in a point is to experience the divine love without mediation. But before Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle, it was Dante who set forth the vernacular theological tradition of the punctum in late medieval literature. In the Paradiso, Dante emphasises the act of sustained gazing at a point. Beatrice is continually looking at the sun and the heavenly spheres. As Dante reaches the end of his pilgrimage, he too looks into the centre of the divine circle and sees ‘un punto vidi che raggiava lume /​acuto’ [I saw a point which radiated a light so keen] (28.16–​ 17).68 The turning towards the point, manifested in the Paradiso as heliotropism, explains the dominant presence of the archery imagery in the canticle. Regarding human reason, Dante perceives that ‘ch’a questo segno /​molto si mira e poco si discerne’ [at this mark [understanding] there is much aiming and little discernment] (7.61–​2). In contrast, the divine Mind never misses, ‘per che quantunque quest’arco saetta /​disposto cade a proveduto fine, /​sì come cosa in suo segno diretta’ [so that whatever this bow shoots falls disposed to a foreseen end, even as a shaft directed to its mark] (8.103–​5). Dante’s endeavour in The Divine Comedy, his attempt to see God face to face, can be summed up in the image of his aiming at, shooting and hitting the punto. The punto is both the end goal and the origin. In Canto 28, Beatrice instructs Dante that ‘Da quel punto /​depende il cielo e tutta la natura’ [On that point the heavens and all nature are dependent] (28.40–​1). The point becomes philosophical and non-​material, a purely geometric abstraction; Dante reaffirms Augustine’s conception of God as the generating point of all things. When he reaches the sphere of the sun, Dante is bedazzled by the souls of the wise as points of light that make up two spinning circles (11.13–​21). Later, in the Primum Mobile, he sees a radiating point and nine circles of fire whirling rapidly around it (28.22–​30). The nine spheres’ eternal whirling around the punto resembles the lover’s endless encircling of the object a that Lacan describes. At the point is the divine mind (la mente divina) surrounded by love and light: ‘Luce e amor d’un cerchio lui comprende’ [light and love enclose it in a circle] (27.112). The point, Beatrice further reveals, is the origin of time

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(27.117–​18). While he travels towards a single point (the centre of hell and Satan’s body) in the Inferno, in the Paradiso, Dante simultaneously approaches both the divine point and the Empyrean, a single point and a vast abstract space. The circumference and the point are blurred, as Dante observes: ‘il trïunfo che lude /​sempre dintorno al punto che mi vinse, /​parendo inchiuso da quel ch’elli ‘nchiude’. [the triumph that plays forever round the point which overcame me seeming enclosed by that which it encloses] (30.10–​ 12). The merging of the point and the circumference resonates with the mutual parasitisation of the ergon and the parergon that Derrida theorises. Though the Paradiso celebrates geometric regularity, it ultimately admits the breakdown of geometry and the limitation of the point. In a moment of rapture, Dante sees a rapid succession of geometric figures towards the end of The Divine Comedy: a river of light, a circle, a rose which is the City of God, a Book, and three circles representing the Trinity. In a language charged with eroticism, Dante describes: ‘[el] punto che m’avëa vinto’ [the point which had overcome me] (39.9). The point coheres but also collapses, signifying the heart of the Christian mystery –​language fails where geometry collapses. At the moment Dante reaches the divine punto, he returns to his originary point. As a dream vision, Pearl may be read in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially the Paradiso.69 The Pearl Maiden is a Beatrice figure who guides the obtuse Dreamer towards a vision of the Heavenly City and salvation, mirroring Dante’s journey to the nine spheres. However, in Pearl, the word ‘poynt’ appears only three times; and when it does, it is used not in its primary meanings of quantification of space or time, but in its secondary meanings. When the Pearl Maiden rebukes the jeweller who trusts his mortal eyes, she uses the ‘poynt’ to mean ‘an instance’; the jeweller thus exemplifies ‘a poynt o sorquydryye’ [an instance of pride] (309). In its second appearance, ‘poynt’ denotes ‘a principle or central theme’. When he protests the unequal wage system in the Parable of the Vineyard, the Dreamer argues that ‘In Sauter is sayd a verce overte /​ That spekes a poynt determynable’ [In Psalter is a verse plain /​That speaks a definite point] (593–​4). And in its third, ‘poynt’ refers to ‘a note or phrase of music’. Gazing at the procession of virgins in the New Jerusalem, the Dreamer proclaims that ‘non was never so

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quoynt /​For alle the craftes that ever thay knewe, /​That of that songe myght synge a poynt’ [none was never so skilful /​For all the crafts that ever they knew, /​That of that song might sing a phrase] (889–​90). However, despite the paucity of its appearances, the poynt is key to understanding mourning’s affective labour, desire’s play of spatial and temporal distance and the theology of colour in Pearl. Significantly, the poynt is marked by whiteness. From the outset, the Pearl–​poet highlights the sphericity of the pearl: ‘So rounde, so reken in uche araye, /​so smal, so smothe her sydes were’ [So round, so lovely in each setting, /​so small, so smooth her sides were] (5–​6). Whatever else it may signify, the pearl, as the originary source of the Dreamer’s desire, is a point. The Pearl Maiden, as body and object, is a figurative and literal point. And the Dreamer’s encircling of the Maiden and his later gravitation towards the centre of the New Jerusalem, the Lamb of God, parallel Dante’s journey to the divine punto in the Paradiso.70 The sense of space throughout Pearl is frequently marked by the mapping of points, similar to the Man in Black’s grid-​like spatiality in the Book of the Duchess. As Stanbury notes, in the poem’s first set of stanzas, the word ‘spot’ ‘recurs in ways that force associative relationships between location and absence, between the set of compass points that places him physically and the negativity that marks the pearl as both without stain (without “spot”) and without a place (without “spot”) in his world’.71 ‘Spot’ simultaneously denotes ‘without stain’ and ‘without place’; both meanings play on the signification of the point. A point, as a small dot marked on a surface, is a stain, a spot. As a spatial marker, a point marks the spot. The Dreamer’s body –​grieving, sleeping and dreaming –​remains paralysed at the very spot where he claims to have lost his ‘perle’: ‘in that spote hit fro me sprange’ [it sprang from me in that spot] (13). Points, or what the Pearl–​poet prefers to call ‘spots’, establish a proto-​Cartesian space –​be it physical, psychic or spiritual –​ within which the Dreamer navigates. After a lengthy vision of the New Jerusalem, during which the Pearl Maiden seems to have disappeared into the divine space at the centre, the Dreamer once more spots her among the procession of virgins; she now appears as a single white point among many. The sight of the Maiden rekindles

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the Dreamer’s memory of the valley of the Earthly Paradise, as well as of the time he has spent with her. The Dreamer’s visual desire is fundamentally perspectival in nature. Anchored at the vantage point on the hill bounded by the parergonal stream, the Dreamer perceives the New Jerusalem in ways that resemble and anticipate early modern theory of linear perspective that creates illusionistic three-​dimensional space in two-​dimensional pictorial art. As a theory, linear perspective is premised on the assumption that ‘visual space is ordered a priori by an abstract, uniform system of linear coordinates’.72 Looking at a linear perspectival painting, the viewer directs their gaze towards a single point on the picture plane. This point dictates the spatial arrangement within the pictorial frame, allowing the illusion of proper size and distance. The term ‘vanishing point’, commonly used to denote the centric point and to express the convergence of parallel lines in a perspectival painting, did not exist in the early modern period but made its first appearance in the eighteenth century.73 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–​72), who wrote the first book on the rules of linear perspective, referred to this point simply as punto centrico (‘centric point’) and said it was to be placed at the centre of the drawing plane as the single locus for all other elements in the picture.74 In reality, the vanishing point is a misnomer that does not accurately describe the perception of objects in perspectival vision or painting. The illusion of depth does not necessarily imply any loss of the object’s materiality; rather, the added dimension of depth enhances the solidity of the object. Material objects do not simply vanish along the converging lines of vision but maintain their thingness everywhere, even at the punto centrico. At the moderate distance that Bacon insists is necessary for visual perception, and in the midst of the encircling of desire around the traumatic punctum, the object a cannot be the empty place of a lack but must assume the material body of the lost object: such is the hope of the lover who mourns and longs. Indeed, what the Dreamer is looking for is not a vanishing but a non-​vanishing point. And what does not vanish is the body. The Dreamer, like a viewer gazing at a perspectival painting, is drawn to the Lamb of God at the centre of the New Jerusalem (1135–​7).

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As it progresses, Pearl effects a torsion from an object biography of whiteness, as embodied in the Pearl Maiden, to an encirclement of a traumatic point of whiteness, as figured in the Lamb of God. Just as the Maiden is physically and spiritually enveloped in white, so ‘Thys Jerusalem Lombe hade never pechche /​Of other huee bot quyt jolyf /​That mot ne masklle moght on streche, /​For wolle quyte so ronk and ryf’ [This Jerusalem’s Lamb never had patch /​Of other hue but bright white /​To which neither spot nor stain might adhere, /​For white wool so luxuriant and abundant] (841–​4).75 The bloody wound on the Lamb creates a visual paradox in the poem. Rosalind Field has pointed out that while the Pearl Maiden depicts a spotless Lamb (841–​4), the Dreamer, in contrast, sees a bleeding Lamb (1135–​7). Since the Maiden cannot be wrong, Field suggests, the Dreamer’s vision of a pierced and bleeding Lamb marks his perception as faulty and base. For Stanbury, the Lamb’s open wound is the mark of the feminine; the bleeding lamb is metonymically allied to the (menstruating) female body.76 I would add that the wounded Lamb is jouissance, the S (Ø), and the divine punctum around which desire inexorably encircles. The source of the stream in Pearl turns out to be divine blood. In the affective loop that converts blood into water, and water back into blood, the Lamb’s wound signifies the originary trauma of the Dreamer’s subjectivity. Like that of the stream, the Dreamer’s motion in Pearl is continuously determined by the centric point towards which he moves in both centripetal and centrifugal fashions. He is centripetally drawn to the spot where the pearl lies buried, the centre of his grief within the erber (37–​8). But later when he is in the Earthly Paradise, the Dreamer moves centripetally across space to a desired punctum; he longs to join the Maiden –​the centre of his desire –​on the other side of the stream (1155–​6). The Dreamer also moves centrifugally as his ghosted body rises from the spot in the erber and moves outward: ‘Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space’ (61). In moving away from the centre of his loss in the erber, the Dreamer, paradoxically, finds the centre of the Christian mystery as he follows the Maiden’s urging to ‘Bow up towarde thys bornes heved’ [go up towards this stream’s source] (974). Jerusalem, the centre of medieval Christianity, is the visual centric point towards which the Dreamer moves centripetally and fixes his gaze.

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As the poem progresses, the Dreamer’s appetite for sensory experience also grows, and his desire to cross the stream remains fundamentally a visual desire. At the end of the poem, his turning of his gaze from the Lamb to the Maiden (1141–​8) signifies his attachment to the corporeal world and his inability to grasp fully the spiritual truth of the vision he is witnessing. The sight of the Maiden once again triggers the Dreamer’s desire, and he expresses his propensity to move from image to desire (1155–​6). And it is the Maiden’s whiteness that provides the necessary catalyst to the Dreamer’s final resolution to cross the stream: ‘Lorde, much of mirthe was that ho made /​Among her feres that was so quyt! /​ That syght me gart to thenk to wade /​For luf longyng in gret delyt’ [Lord, much mirth did she make /​Among her companions that was so white! /​That sight made me to think to wade /​For love-​longing in great delight] (1149–​51). The Dreamer becomes the excess of the frame breaking into the centre, attempting to collapse the distance between him and the Lady–​Object. Yet he is never allowed to fully realise his desire, as Christ stops him in his tracks. He awakes at the very ‘spot’ where his ‘perle to grounde strayed’ [pearl to the ground had strayed] (1173); the promise of consolation feeds back into the state of mourning. The concept of homogeneous space, Panofsky argues, is premised on the idea that all geometric points ‘are devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations … [Therefore,] from every point in space it must be possible to draw similar figures in all directions and magnitudes’.77 But Panofsky immediately proceeds to dismiss his own speculation as impossible to realise in space. The vanishing point, Panofsky concludes, simply cannot be anywhere or everywhere. The crucial question to be asked is precisely ‘where on the picture field is the central vanishing point best placed, how close or how far the perpendicular distance ought to be measured, and whether and to what extent an oblique view of the entire space seems admissible’.78 Psychoanalytically, the questions of distance (‘how close or how far’) and perspective (‘to what extent an oblique view seems admissible’) resonate with similar concerns of Lacan’s spatial anamorphosis of desire. For Panofsky, homogeneity of space is an impossibility because ‘the “claim” of the object … confronts the ambition of the subject. The

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object intends to remain distanced from the spectator (precisely as something “objective”)’.79 The confrontation between the object’s claim and the subject’s ambition results in a refusal of the object to coincide or be identified with the centric point, thereby maintaining its removedness, its obliqueness, from the subject. The Dreamer never confuses the Pearl Maiden –​whatever or whoever she may be or signify –​with Christ the Lamb. But if the object refuses to coincide with the point, there nevertheless remain some material traces of the object in the space of the point. At the white punctum of Pearl, at least from the perspective of the Dreamer if not the Maiden, Christ the Lamb bleeds red. What the Dreamer sees is not a whiteness absolute but whiteness plus something else: an excess that breaks through the white surface. Unlike the Pearl Maiden, who in her capacity as the Lady–​Object covers up the traumatic jouissance of the Dreamer, the bleeding Lamb –​the centric point of Pearl’s whiteness –​does not cover up its own woundedness. The poem’s bleeding whiteness alludes to a different meaning of ‘poynt’ as ‘a small hole; prick, puncture’.80 When the Dreamer shifts his gaze from the Lamb to the Pearl Maiden, it might be more accurate to read the Dreamer’s shifting of his gaze as the result of the unbearable woundedness of the Lamb’s whiteness. Whiteness bruises him. And if the Lamb’s blood is the rem(a)inder of material object, then what Pearl narrates is not simply the object biography of whiteness but the object biography of the punctum, or, better yet, the affective biography of woundedness. The Dreamer, by readjusting his visual focus from the Lamb to the Pearl Maiden, reveals his preference for an all-​ consuming whiteness into which desire’s prickliness vanishes.

White hole: A history of labour Alberti’s conception of the point, to which he attributes both qualitative and quantitative values, finds a comparable treatment in the work of the fifteenth-​century polymath Nicholas of Cusa. In De Beryllo, Nicholas notes: In the indivisibility of a point are enfolded all the foregoing indivisibilities. Therefore, in those indivisibilities there is found

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nothing except the unfolding of the indivisibility of a point. Therefore, all that is present in a material object is only the point, i.e., is only a likeness of the one. Moreover, a point does not exist as free from a material object.81

The intrinsic imbrications of the material object with the point, what Nicholas Cusa terms ‘indivisibility’, posit the necessary existence of the point-​object within time and space. The Pearl Maiden, insofar as she is the traumatic punctum for the Dreamer, remains bound to the material world of bodies and objects –​at least from his point of view. Psychoanalytically, the significance of the Maiden’s materiality resides not only in her thingness as a pearl but also in her role as the Lady–​Object as the radical Other. In his formulation, Žižek contends that the Lady, rather than being a signifier of some transcendent spiritual love, is ‘as far as possible from any kind of purified spirituality’.82 Instead, the Lady ‘functions as an inhuman partner in the sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires, [and] as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random’.83 And more than an automaton, the Lady as the ‘traumatic Otherness is what Lacan designates by means of the Freudian term das Ding, the Thing –​the Real that “always returns to its place”, the hard kernel that resists symbolization’.84 In her interactions with the lover–​mourner, the Lady–​Object, as the Thing, appears as an ‘empty surface … [a]‌cold, neutral screen’ onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies.85 A flattening effect of the material has taken place. It is not that the Lady–​Object –​as the lack (the lost object) within the subject –​is without materiality, but that she can only be approached as purely a surface phenomenon, Lacan’s anamorphic spatialisation of the subject’s desire. And while Žižek sees the ‘mute mirror-​surface’ of the Lady–​Object functioning ‘as a kind of “black hole” in reality, as a limit whose Beyond is inaccessible’, the Pearl–​poet envelops his Pearl Maiden in a radiant whiteness on whose surface the Dreamer sees himself.86 His narcissistic projection is the affective labour of mourning. If a black hole can only be entered from the outside, then a more appropriate metaphor for the Pearl Maiden is the ‘white hole’, which cannot be entered from the outside. The Dreamer, stuck in

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the parergon, cannot cross the stream and enter the space of salvific whiteness. Affective economy, as Sara Ahmed theorises, always involves both a sideways movement ‘between signs, figures, and objects’ and a backward movement that conjures its own spectres of historicity.87 The backward temporal movement of the affected object renders the object a temporal archive. Whiteness, as manifest in Pearl, is an object-​based temporal archive, a memorial to the Dreamer’s loss; and the poem’s affective mourning is a work of memory. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, the act of recollection in ancient and medieval theories of memory is frequently conceived as a movement along a series of imagistic associations, or catena. In Pearl, as in the Book of the Duchess, the work of memory too takes the form of concatenation, as the poem moves from the material pearl to the Maiden, to the Dreamer’s deceased daughter, to the New Jerusalem and to Christ the Lamb. The work of memory thereby creates an affective economy that attempts to align the Dreamer to the Pearl Maiden, and later to Christ and the New Jerusalem. Pearl’s concatenation in white marks the Dreamer’s impulse to bestow both significance and interiority on things, what Bill Brown calls the impossibility of granting things only ‘superficiality and opacity’.88 The memorial catena in Pearl dramatises the Dreamer’s frustration and failure at trying to pinpoint the exact significance of the pearl-​qua-​ Maiden, hence his stalling and circling within the feedback loop of mourning. Throughout the imagistic concatenation from pearl to the Lamb of God, whiteness remains constant in the affective mnemonic chain; there is no real movement beyond whiteness, only its permutations. Whiteness, like the river that divides the Dreamer from the Maiden, marks the limit of the Dreamer’s affective labour. His memory, at best, is what Clough would designate as traumatised: the body in trauma becomes ‘a surfacing of a difficulty in remembering or in being certain about the truth of memory’.89 The Dreamer’s rapid descent into doubt over the true nature and identity of the Pearl Maiden is symptomatic of his traumatised state. His oscillation between historical certitude and present uncertainty exposes his temporal and epistemological confusions: he insists that the Maiden died at two years of age (483), refuses to accept her transformation into a heavenly queen

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(492), and wonders about the nature of her ‘life’ (392). Refusing consolation, the Dreamer remains inconsolable. One of the great ironies of Pearl is the fact that, throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, pearls were valued for their alleged curative powers over illnesses, one of which is lovesickness. According to a medieval English lapidary, Margarita is chef of al stons þat ben wyзt & preciose, as Ised seyþ … [A]‌nd somme seyne þat þey comforten lymes & membris, for it clenseþ him of superfluite of humours & fasten þe lymes, & helpen aзen þe cordiacle passioun & agens swonyng of hert.90 [Pearl is chief of all stones that are white and precious, as Isidore says … [A]‌nd some say that they comfort limbs and members, for it cleanses them of the superfluity of humors and [they] strengthen the limbs, and help against cardiac pain [or disease] and against heart failure.]91

But in spite of pearls’ restorative virtues, the Dreamer remains stuck in whiteness and in the state of lovesickness. Whiteness marks the limit of mourning. Unable to move beyond whiteness or to any sense of stable meaning, the Dreamer and the Maiden continue the affective game of substitutions in white, mise en abyme. Throughout Pearl, there is a deliberate coyness about and silence over the material production of pearls, as if the text is content with the myth of the pearl’s natural whiteness. Pearls have always been produced through a time-​consuming process by either natural or cultured oysters. Valerie Allen has pointed out that a pearl begins as ‘an irritant, a piece of grit inside a shellfish, which then coats the grit in calceous matter called nacre that would ordinarily go into lining its shell … A pearl then is something valuable one extracts with difficulty from a receptacle of much lesser value [though not from the oyster’s point of view]’.92 In Allen’s reading, the material production of pearls is figurative of ‘a hermeneutic process that turns dross words into sentence’; as an act of distillation and refinement, pearl production resembles ‘the transformative possibilities of the alchemical and the metallic’.93 Whereas Allen stresses the broader resemblance between pearl production and literary labour, here, I would like to focus on the conscious material production of pearls’ whiteness. Most pearls harvested naturally in the medieval

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West were small, deformed, coloured and/​or diseased. Commenting on the poor quality of British pearls, Pliny observes that whereas the best pearls originate in the East, those harvested in Britain are ‘parvos atque decoloures’ [small and discoloured]. Tacitus concurs by describing British pearls as ‘subfusc ac liventia’ [brownish or bluish].94 In the Middle Ages, as R. A. Donkin notes, pearls were frequently whitened using compounds of potassium (potash, alum, tartar), vinegar and lemon juice.95 As the eleventh-​century Persian scholar Al-​Biruni documents, If the blackness is in the skin, it [the pearl] is plunged into the mil of figs for forty days, then changed into a vessel in which is Mahlab, Khirwa and camphor, one part of each ingredient, and placed over charcoal-​fire for two hours without fanning the fire, then it is taken off. If (however) the blackness is in the interior it is smeared with bees-​wax and placed in a vessel with the sour juice of lemons and is shaken continually; the sour juice is renewed every three days till it whitens.96

Other medieval techniques of pearl whitening included polishing a lustreless pearl with rice flour or dust, or the use of the juice of watermelons, cucumbers and pumpkins and that of bone marrow. In one extraordinary method, a domestic bird –​usually a pigeon, dove or hen –​was induced to swallow a pearl and pass it through the intestines.97 The bird became a surrogate oyster. In addition to artisanal techniques of whitening natural pearls, and centuries before Mikimoto’s pearl culture, the ancient and medieval worlds –​ from Egypt to Greece, India, Persia and China –​already possessed the knowledge of fabricating artificial pearls. Later in the early modern period, Leonardo da Vinci wrote a recipe for making artificial pearls out of the paste of small pearls or mother-​of-​pearl, lemon juice and egg white.98 In light of the historical documentation of the harvesting and processing of pearls, the silence over the material production of pearls in Pearl is surprising. Perhaps such knowledge was so widespread and ordinary that the Pearl–​poet deemed it unremarkable and unnecessary to mention. But in the face of the Dreamer’s endless narrativisation of his lost object and his grief, and of the fact of his profession as a jeweller, the silence over pearl production is unsettling and troubling. The suppression of the history of

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material labour in Pearl, exemplified in the naturalised whiteness of the pearl, parallels the deceptive relationship between affects and objects. As Ahmed argues, affects ‘appear in objects, or indeed as objects with a life of their own, only by the concealment of how they are shaped by histories, including histories of production (labour and labour time), as well as circulation or exchange’.99 Commodity fetishism, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, is a kind of double forgetting: first the capitalist forgets that it is he and his tribe who have projected life and value into commodities in the ritual of exchange … But then, a second phase of amnesia sets in that is quite unknown to primitive fetishism. The commodity veils itself in familiarity and triviality, in the rationality of purely quantitative relations … The deepest magic of the commodity fetish is its denial that there is anything magical about it.100

In the poem, ‘perle’ is a commodity fetish, and whiteness figures its veil of forgetting. The Dreamer–​capitalist first ‘forgets’ his projection of narcissistic longing and mourning onto the commodified Lady–​ Object, thereby refusing to acknowledge that the courtly ritual between him and the Pearl Maiden is simply an endless game of deferral of consummation. The Lady–​Object veils herself in a whiteness that denies her own status as a product of labour and conceals the Dreamer’s affective investment in her. ‘Perle’, whitened, is but one of the ‘inert things with a mystified aura’.101 Stanbury contends that Pearl’s various surfaces, made of precious materials, are subject to ‘speculation about their value and operate in the poem within a complex commentary on measure, merit, quantification and valuation’.102 I would add that Pearl’s surfaces are also subject to whitening. Whiteness, like Žižek’s Lady–​Object, emerges as a surface phenomenon; it is the cold, neutral screen of the Lady–​Object onto which the lover projects his fantasy. Whitening, as a material process, is an effect of chemical reactions; as a psychological process, it is a narcissistic projection of desire. The whiteness of ‘perle’ is the end result of the object’s mutation –​be it through chemicals or desire, which is itself as much a chemical as a psychic phenomenon. The Pearl Maiden’s radiant white accoutrements adorned with pearls, Felicity Riddy observes, reflect the late fourteenth-​ century aristocratic taste for white

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enamelling en ronde bosse, in which enamel is applied to the surface of a three-​dimensional figure or metalwork.103 Seeta Chaganti further argues that the description of the Pearl Maiden effectively renders her a ‘notional ekphrasis’, a verbal representation of an imagined de luxe artefact.104 Reading Pearl within the context of late medieval artefact culture, Chaganti foregrounds the similarity between the poem’s aestheticisation of pearls and whiteness and the artisanal techniques of contemporary art, especially those involved in the production of devotional objects. Pearl is an ‘inscriptional object’.105 And its whiteness is a sign of the artifice of desire that has been thickened and enamelled. What exactly does the whiteness of Pearl conceal? Affect, Ahmed argues, appears in an object only through the concealment of its own historicity. Ahmed’s notion of affective concealment resonates with the workings of Lacan’s object a, which, when viewed up close, appears as something that covers up the subject’s trauma. The Lady–​Object, by standing both in the way of and in the place of the lost object, effectively covers up the subject’s traumatic jouissance. The whitening of the physical and the spiritual ‘perle’ signifies the covering up of trauma; mourning qua whitening is another form of the Dreamer’s affective labour. Whiteness is simultaneously the product of labour and the erasure of the history of labour. However, complete erasure is impossible; the Lamb’s bleeding wound is a mark of salvific and material labour. In the middle of the pearl remains that original grit, the irritant, the punctum around which the whiteness of the nacre circles. Pearl is the symbol par excellence of physical and psychic woundedness. The Dreamer shifts his gaze from the bleeding Lamb to the Pearl Maiden because of his inability to bear the full brunt of desire’s wounding power. Likewise, the Pearl–​poet, in his avoidance of labour’s history and pain behind the whitening of the pearl, enacts a similar psychic displacement. He, too, cannot bear to look at the wound within whiteness. Pearl might very well be a precious object or jewel. But in his deliberate silence, the Pearl–​poet nevertheless draws attention to the poem’s own woundedness. Whiteness, while connected to historicity and materialised as objects in Pearl, figures itself as a historical erasure: the buried and seemingly unrecoverable origin of mourning itself. John Bowers has

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argued that Pearl might have alluded to Richard II’s extravagant mourning for the death of Anne of Bohemia in 1394.106 As a form of affective labour and as an extravagant immaterial commodity, mourning accrues value. Like trauma, which is ‘a surfacing of a difficulty in remembering’, whiteness in Pearl is a surfacing of a difficulty in desiring.107 The value of mourning lies in the individual and collective investment in how affective value ‘shapes the surface of bodies and worlds’.108 Affective shaping in Pearl conjures up both a past historicised by experiential loss and a future envisioned as apocalyptic timelessness, to which the Dreamer is denied access. The proclamation of an end is always a wishful movement that cannot conjure away the telos, Derrida argues.109 The Pearl Maiden that the Dreamer conjures up is the artefactual body of affective sociality whose whiteness signals the necessary erasure of material labour that history, and implicitly the work of mourning, demands.

White fragilisation José Esteban Muñoz contends that white skin, as the desired surface, is ‘the white shell, but it is also the barrier that prevents the desiring subject from discovering the inside: blood and guts’.110 The textual description of the Pearl Maiden in Pearl is a notional ekphrasis of an imagined artefact with white enamelling en ronde bosse, as Chaganti argues. A devotional object with a white enamelled surface, the Pearl Maiden is the white skin, the coveted white shell and barrier. As such, she embodies the dynamics between the parergon and the ergon; the Maiden as a ghosted body is a white sheath that the Dreamer desperately tries to access. She beckons with her white exteriority, but he cannot discover her interiority beneath whiteness. If White in the Book of the Duchess is an absent, disembodied map of whiteness, then the Pearl Maiden is the enfleshed but sheathed reliquary of whiteness. The logic of late medieval reliquaries –​simultaneously hiding and displaying the relics across multiple human and salvific temporalities –​is very much the logic of Clough’s ghosted body and that of Muñoz’s white shell. As a devotional object, the Pearl Maiden is the undead white, a relic and its own reliquary. Her shell, decorated with priceless jewels and pearls, is at once impenetrable and fragile.

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White fragility is a style, an aesthetic category and ontology. It identifies whiteness as inherently a shelled, ghosted, but enfleshed phenomenon. That is, aesthetic making is simultaneously intensification and fragilisation. The physical and verbal whitening of pearls is an act of intensifying whiteness; whiteness congeals and thickens, like a pearl. White fragility is secretionary because, like oyster shell, it is hard but brittle. But making is also concealing. In Pearl, white congealment slides into and fuses with white concealment. The poem hides the whitening of pearls but foregrounds the bleeding of the Lamb of God; the wound is a punctum of fragility that cannot congeal. Robin DiAngelo suggests that white fragility’s denial of race protects racial capitalism: ‘The disavowal of race … is necessary to support current structures of capitalism and domination, for without it, the correlation between the distribution of social resources and unearned white privilege would be evident’.111 I would substitute –​or add on –​‘labour’ and ‘whiteness’ for ‘race’: the disavowal of labour and whiteness reaffirms the structures of economy and power. Pearl spotlights the late medieval commingling of material and salvational economies, as readers have pointed out; and both are equally fragile. The disavowals of labour and whiteness result in immaterial labour without material labour, and decorative whiteness without critical whiteness. Lacanian explanations of desire –​be they figurations of proximity and distance, screen, and object –​are really theories of how normativity operates as cultural praxis and congeals into subjectivity. Courtly love and white fragility are but some of the iterations of desire in Western thought. Muñoz calls a normative ideal a ‘normative imprint’, which structures desires and communities. But the normative is always ‘posited elsewhere, and its normativity needs to be reiterated continually’.112 In Pearl, the elsewhere is right across the stream, or so it seems. As in the Book of the Duchess, the elsewhere that the Dreamer (a white fragiliac) seeks turns out to be the spot where he has fallen asleep. The elsewhere is the scene of labour, of the production of whiteness. The poem does not address the physical whitening of pearls because the Dreamer is already whitening the ‘perle’-​qua-​Maiden, again and again, through textual enamelling. Whiteness is a recursive poetic making that is paradoxically visible and invisible. Mourning, like desire, is fragilisation. ***

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Part I investigates medieval whiteness as a signifier of individual loss, fragility and mourning. White fragility subtends courtly love, and the masculine subject in grief is a white fragiliac who must write his way out of whiteness as an extreme state of paralysis and death. Moreover, white fragilisation is the process by which the normativity of whiteness hardens into cultural praxes, during which the labour that has produced whiteness disappears from memory. What are left are the ghosted bodies and traumatised remains of erased histories that haunt the white subject. Part II examines whiteness as an index of precarity in the body politic, as well as of its imbrications with materiality, aesthetics and religion. I turn to the white leather skin-​suit, worn by actors playing Christ in the Middle Ages, as a signifier of both white salvation and precarity, and then to cuteness as a style and strategy of medieval anti-​Semitism in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale.

Notes 1 William Carlos Williams, ‘The Descent’, in Paterson (New York: New Direction Books, 1992), p. 78. 2 In F. Krenkow (trans.), ‘The Chapter on Pearls in The Book on Precious Stones by Al-​Beruni’, Islamic Culture, 16:1 (1943), 30–1. 3 E. V. Gordon (ed.), Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). My translation. Citations by line numbers. 4 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 31. 5 Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 3. 6 Ibid., pp. 6–​7. 7 David Katz, The World of Colour, trans. R. B. MacLeod and C. W. Fox (London: Paul, 1935), p. 164. 8 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 222, original emphasis. 9 Ibid., p. 211. 10 D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 157. 11 George Edmondson, ‘Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004), 40. 12 Ibid., 61.

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13 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 5. 14 See Lucy D. Anderson, ‘Colour as Rhetorical Ductus in the Middle English Pearl’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 56 (2012), 27–​ 42. Anderson argues that colour in the poem signals emotional state: ‘each time a colour is reported, the Dreamer registers a corresponding “feeling state”, consequently becoming active in his environment’ (28). 15 For metonymic readings of Pearl, see Alan J. Fletcher, ‘Reading Radical Metonymy in Pearl’, in Lawrence Besserman (ed.), Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 47–​61; and Teresa P. Reed, ‘May, the Maiden, and Metonymy in Pearl’, South Atlantic Review, 65:2 (2000), 134–​62. Fletcher argues that metonymy ‘offers a unique point of access to the understanding of the poem’s aesthetic and cultural dynamics’ (47); and Reed, for whom the poem’s ‘metonymic logic’ connects heaven ‘fluidly to human desires and bodies’ (135). See also Felicity Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, in Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds), A Companion to the Gawain-​Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 152; and Heather Maring, ‘ “Never the Less”: Gift-​Exchange and the Medieval Dream-​Vision Pearl’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 38:2 (2005), 2. 16 Sarah Stanbury, ‘Introduction’, in Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), p. 6. See also David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2019). Coley argues that the pearl ‘always remains a pearl, even as it becomes a seed, a courtly maiden, a dead child, a daughter, the pure Christian soul, the Pearl of Price, the Lamb of God, the Kingdom of Heaven’ (76). 17 See, for example, Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Bill Brown (ed.), Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 18 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, trans. James M. Edie, et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 163. 19 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, in Brown (ed.), Things, p. 7.

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20 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 159. 21 Ibid., p. 158. 22 Ibid., p. 188. 23 See, for example, Kevin Marti, Body, Heart, and Text in the Pearl-​ Poet (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1991). Marti contends that ‘the shining whiteness that characterizes both the flesh and its clothing is a standard feature of the glorified appearance of believers after the resurrection’ (p. 110). See also Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, pp. 143–​55; Riddy suggests that the whiteness of the pearl signifies virginity, while the pearl’s smallness represents the virtue of humility (p. 145). And Robert J. Blanch, ‘Color Symbolism and Mystical Contemplation in Pearl’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 17 (1973), 58–​77; Blanch argues that white is ‘conventionally associated with the purity of the beatified state’ (65). 24 James W. Earl, ‘Saint Margaret and the Pearl Maiden’, Modern Philology, 70:1 (1972), 1–​8. 25 Quoted in C. A. Luttrell, ‘The Mediæval Tradition of the Pearl Virginity’, Medium Ævum, 31:3 (1962), 194. 26 The Latin is in Earl, ‘Saint Margaret’, 3. 27 Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 2. 28 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 66. 29 Ibid., p. 68. 30 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Intertemporality’, in Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell and Mary K. Ramsey (eds), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 197. 31 Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. xi. See also Kenneth Chong, ‘ “Bot a quene!”: Calculating Salvation in Pearl’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 40 (2018), 217–​55. Chong argues that the economy of salvation in Pearl is based on an arithmetic and a geometric model of justice (217). 32 Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, p. 150. 33 See Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). On the historical changes in late medieval conceptions of time,

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Le Goff broadly conceives of three systems of temporality prevalent in the Middle Ages: Church time, merchant time and labour time. 34 Chris Humphrey, ‘Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England’, in Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), p. 108. 35 See Mary Raschko, The Politics of Middle English Parables: Fiction, Theology, and Social Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Raschko contends that the Pearl Maiden is arguing against contemporary theology of material and salvational economies (p. 15). 36 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 193. 37 Michael Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’, Boundary 2, 26:2 (1999), 97–​8. 38 See María Bullón-​ Fernández, ‘ “By3onde þe water”: Courtly and Religious Desire in Pearl’, Studies in Philology, 91:1 (1994), 35–​49. Bullón-​Fernández notes that Pearl fuses the literary traditions of both religious and courtly visions (37). 39 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 129. 40 Edmondson, ‘Shadow of the Object’, 30. 41 Ibid., 51. 42 Ibid., 41. 43 Ibid., 46. Edmondson observes that pearls were ‘already objects of the greatest cultural desire in the later Middle Ages, objects privileged by symbolic order not only for their physical beauty, but for their power to represent’ (42 n.37). 44 See Michael D. Cherniss, Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987), pp. 151–​68; and V. E. Watts, ‘Pearl as a Consolatio’, Medium Ævum, 32:1 (1963), 34–​6. For other studies of the medieval engagements with Boethian consolation, see Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (eds), The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2008). 45 Léglu and Milner, Erotics of Consolation, p. 11. 46 David C. Lindberg (ed. and trans.), Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s Perspectiva with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 327. 47 Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-​Poet: Description and the Art of Perception (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 21, my emphasis. 48 See Gordon, Pearl, p. 77 n.917. Gordon notes that the Dreamer visualises the Heavenly City as a typical medieval town.

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49 The visual motif of the stream as a frame occurs in several illustrated Apocalypses, such as Cambridge, MS R.16.2. In some illuminations, the river flows out through the ever-​open gate of the Heavenly City and into the surrounding landscape. In others, the river flows into a moat around the City’s walls. And in a few of them, the river flows past the hill where John stands, cutting him off from the City. See Rosalind Field, ‘The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl’, Modern Language Review, 81:1 (1986), 8 n.6. 50 See Irene E. Harvey, ‘Derrida, Kant, and the Performance of Parergonality’, in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 57–​74. As Harvey points out, Kant in his third Critique defines parerga as ‘those things which do not belong to the complete representation of the object internally as elements, but only externally as complements’ (p. 59). 51 Jacques Derrida, Parergon, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, in The Truth in Painting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 56. 52 Edmondson, ‘Shadow of the Object’, 53. 53 Elizabeth Salter, ‘Medieval Poetry and the Visual Arts’, Essays and Studies, ns 22 (1969), 28–​9. 54 Ibid., 28. For another study on marginalia in medieval art, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992). 55 Derrida, Parergon, p. 59. 56 Ibid., p. 63. 57 Ibid., p. 7. 58 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 94. 59 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–​1960, ed. Jacques-​ Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 152. 60 Žižek, ‘Courtly Love’, p. 95. 61 Ibid., p. 95. 62 Edmondson, ‘Shadow of the Object’, 61. 63 MED, s.v. ‘poynt’. 64 Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 43. 65 Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, trans. Richard Misyn, EETS o.s. 106 (London: Paul, 1896), 2.4.75, 28–​32. 66 Julian of Norwich, The Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), II.336, 3–​4.

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67 Ibid., 64.622, 25–​30. 68 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Citations by line number. 69 See, for example, Bullón-​Fernández, ‘Courtly and Religious Desire’, who reads Pearl in the tradition of Roman de la Rose and Dante’s Divine Comedy. 70 See Maring, ‘Gift-​Exchange’, 1–​15. Maring observes that ‘A pearl “so rounde” may point, by its humble material existence, to the perfect unbounded atemporality of God’ (8). 71 Sarah Stanbury (ed.), Pearl (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), p. 4. 72 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 7. 73 Ibid., p. 200. 74 Ibid., pp. 42–​4. 75 Critics have tended to read the figure of the Lamb in Pearl in more traditional terms of medieval Christian iconography, especially those of illuminated Apocalypses from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-​ Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 173; and Muriel A. Whitaker, ‘Pearl and Some Illustrated Apocalypse Manuscripts’, Viator, 12 (1981), 183–​96. Whitaker points to the Book of Revelation (19:7–​8) as the source of the feminised Soul’s white array. 76 Sarah Stanbury, ‘Feminist Masterplots: The Gaze on the Body of Pearl’s Dead Girl’, in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 101. See also Barbara Janina Kowalik, ‘Was She a Boy? The Queer Maiden of the Middle English Pearl’, English Studies, 101:2 (2020), 112–​33, 128. 77 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 30. 78 Ibid., p. 68. 79 Ibid., p. 68, my emphasis. 80 See MED, s.v. ‘pointe’, 1(b). This meaning of the poynt is precisely what the semiotician Roland Barthes refers to when he theorises on the effects of photography upon the viewer. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). In a photograph, Barthes argues, there exist simultaneously the studium, which for Barthes denotes elements of general taste and expected convention, and the punctum, which ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, [and]

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pierces [the viewer]’ (p. 26). In his theory of the punctum, Barthes echoes Alberti’s understanding of the (centric) point as simply a sign, like any other. 81 Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis, MN: Banning Press, 1998), p. 45. 82 Žižek, ‘Courtly Love,’ p. 90. 83 Ibid., p. 90. 84 Ibid., p. 90. 85 Ibid., p. 91. 86 Ibid., p. 91. 87 Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 22:2 (2004), 120. 88 Brown, A Sense of Things, p. 7. 89 Clough, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 90 Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson (eds), English Mediaeval Lapidaries, EETS, 190 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 107–​8. 91 Maring, ‘Gift-​Exchange’, 8–​9. 92 Valerie Allen, ‘Gems of Literature’ (Conference paper, The New Chaucer Society 2008 Congress, 19 July 2008), p. 5. 93 Allen, ‘Gems of Literature’, p. 6, original emphasis. 94 Quoted in Allen, ‘Gems of Literature’, p. 3. 95 R. A. Donkin, Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl-​Fishing: Origins to the Age of Discovery (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1998), p. 261. 96 Krenkow, ‘The Chapter on Pearls’, 31. 97 Donkin, Beyond Price, p. 261. 98 Ibid., p. 263. 99 Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, 121. 100 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 193. 101 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 19. 102 Stanbury (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Pearl, p. 13. 103 Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, p. 148. 104 Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 102–​3. 105 Chaganti, Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, p. 95. 106 John M. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 156. 107 Clough, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 108 Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, 121.

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09 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45. 1 110 José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Dead White: Notes on the Whiteness of the New Queer Cinema’, GLQ, 4:1 (1998), 134. 111 Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3:3 (2011), 60. 112 Muñoz, ‘Dead White’, 129.

Part II Precarity

3 Stretched white leather

Like a tailor, I cut out these portions of cutaneous tissue into a suit of clothes … I will need no sarcophagus. To bear on my dying flesh this second incorruptible skin, drawn from the multitude of people I have known and who will accompany me forever, will be for me sufficient shroud. –​Didier Anzieu1 … Hides hiding hides hiding … –​Mark C. Taylor2

Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Colour, poses an ontological question: ‘Why is it that something can be transparent green but not transparent white?’3 The immediate and obvious answer, he points out, is that white is an opaque colour. Wittgenstein’s recognition that whiteness is not a state of transparency but of opacity suggests that, as a colour, whiteness functions as a veil, a wrap, an envelope, a membrane that does not facilitate but obstructs the vision of what lies behind or within it. Put differently, whiteness is a skin that blocks, conceals and disguises. In this chapter, I investigate whiteness as a skin phenomenon in the interplay among the social, religious and material registers of late medieval English culture. In looking at whiteness as skin, I am less interested in matters of epidermal complexion than in the literal and figurative enfolding, stretching and inscribing that whiteness as skin exhibits or facilitates, with ‘skin’ broadly defined to include clothing, animal skins and theatre costumes. I begin with William Langland’s Piers Plowman, especially Passus XX of the C-​text, in which Christ’s crucified body signifies God’s redemption

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of humanity. Central to the Passion narrative are the Jews and the figure of Longinus, who is both Jewish and blind in Langland’s portrayal. Longinus’s blindness emblematises the veil of ignorance covering the eyes of the recalcitrant Jews who resist the truth of Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. In medieval representational tradition, Jewish ignorance is frequently figured as the blindfold of Synagoga or as the white film covering the eyes of the unbeliever. Whiteness here is a blinding veil that impedes access to divine truth. Longinus’s spearing of Christ’s body leads to his healing and the unveiling of his spiritual eyes, much like Paul’s conversion. As for the Jews, their association with blindness and disability renders them suspect to charges of laziness and dissimulation. Next, I argue that Langland in Passus XX participates directly in late medieval religious performance culture, especially through his characterisations of Christ and the devils in the Harrowing of Hell episode, which resonates with those found in medieval passion drama. Of particular interest is the use of masks and leather costumes in performance. Actors playing devils and black souls, for instance, wore blackface and black masks. The self-​conscious putting on and displaying of identity through colours and objects signals the enmeshment of the material and the social in late medieval performances of identity. I focus on select medieval moments in which the material skin, even when functioning as a literal garment, exhibits and reasserts the body’s power to configure, mark or essentialise identity. Of particular interest is the white leather body-​suit that the actors playing Christ should wear. In this particular instance of identity as performance, the skin qua clothing is the frontier of the self; the human body is clothed in another membrane. In an age without plastic or rubber, animal skins were vital to medieval material culture. The ubiquity of skin products rendered skin the figure par excellence of Christ’s suffering body on the cross, which is re-​imagined as a stretched piece of skin nailed to the cross. Langland, by alluding to late medieval performance culture in Passus XX, points to the visual trope of the crucified Christ as various kinds of skin: drum, parchment, charter and leather costume. The image of the suffering Christ as a skin in pain indexes skin’s primary function as a surface upon which trauma is inscribed.

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Deploying Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Skin Ego, I next explore the phenomenological and psychological significance of the Christ-​ actor in a whitlether suit. Like the biological skin, the Skin Ego is a psychic sheath that contains and protects the ego. For the actor playing Christ, his Skin Ego is momentarily disturbed by the additional layer of leather skin. Resisting a medieval and modern truism that opposes appearance and reality, surface and depth, chaff and kernel, and falsity and truth, I argue that such binaries collapse in the body of the leather-​clad actor. The actor’s body is not the ‘kernel’ of the divine; rather, the actor clad in leather experiences a doubling of his Skin Ego. Literally and figuratively, he possesses a second skin, a veil upon a veil. By collapsing the distance between the divine and the human, the actor is able to embody Christ’s humanity and precarity. The whitlether suit is a pure sign, and not a disguise, of Christ’s suffering. Representing Christ’s body as a skin also has important implications for rethinking the social in the late Middle Ages. Skin is a barrier that contains and excludes; but as a membrane, skin is at best a porous boundary where traffic takes place at its borders. If Christ’s body signifies the whole of Christian society, then Langland, by alluding to the material and devotional practices of white skins in Passus XX, steps outside of an imagined community organised on the basis of medieval clothing alone. Perhaps it is not with the image of society as a social fabric that one should read Piers Plowman; instead, society could be reconceived as a skin. Whiteness as a skin phenomenon is never singular or fixed. What the social skin embraces in Passus XX, and in Piers Plowman as a whole, is not only Christians, but a multitude of precarious bodies –​ Christians or otherwise –​that resist simple taxonomies. I end with a turn towards precarity and trans* studies to argue that in the nexus of whiteness, leather and religion, the whitlether suit and the Christ Charter tradition figure Christian salvation as a theology of precarity; in other words, precarity defines the borders of a faith community. The whitlether suit is an affective, material and social interface that exemplifies the workings of trans*ing, as the asterisk marks the attachment of whiteness to the material object: whit*lether. Signifying the human vulnerability of Christ in the Passion, the body beneath the leather suit is a precarious body.

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But this shared sense of Christian precariousness on display, as a mode of governance, is premised on the precaritisation of the Jews as Europe’s internal Other that must be disciplined, ‘stretched’ and eradicated. Medieval precarity politics, operationalised through whiteness, is rooted in anti-​ Semitism. Figuring the Jews as the enemies of Jesus (also a Jew), the whitlether suit and the Charter of Christ make possible the dovetailing of precarity with Christian theology. The asterisk in the whit*lether –​the stretch of whiteness linking the animal, the human and the divine –​signifies Jewishness; and to stretch the white-​skin-​qua-​whiteness is to stretch the skin of the precaritised Jew. White Christian precarity becomes indistinguishable from white governmentality.

Pier(s)ing the Jewish veil As Will enters his sixth dream vision in Passus XX of the C-​text of Piers Plowman, he sees the ‘blynde Iewe Longius’ (20.85) pierce the body of the crucified Jesus. Immediately, ‘bloed sprang down by the spere and vnspered the knyhtes yes’ (20.889); Longinus is cured of his blindness and converts to Christianity. The figure of Longinus, as evoked by Langland, participates in a long cultural-​historical tradition in medieval Europe that linked the figure of the blind to the figure of the Jew. Edward Wheatley observes that the stereotypes, as well as ‘the social and textual strategies of accusation and exclusion’, were similar for both groups.4 Langland’s blind Longinus is emphatically a Jew and not a Roman centurion. In medieval visual art, Longinus is sometimes represented as wearing a Jewish hat.5 Blindness in the Middle Ages was both fact and metaphor, corporeal and spiritual. In representations of Paul’s conversion, the Middle Ages focused almost obsessively on the figure of the Jew Saul when he was confronted by a blinding light, rather than the figure of the post-​healing and post-​conversion Paul. The intense focus on blindness as a definitive attribute of the Jews, Steven F. Kruger argues, is one example of the medieval conception of Jews as remaining in a corporeal and inconvertible state of existence.6 In the French mystery play, La Vengence et destruction du Hierusalem, for instance, Jews are stricken with blindness after the crucifixion because they refuse to accept the miraculous

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salvation enacted by Christ on the cross.7 Lacking a proper reading of the real significance of the crucifixion and clinging to a literal understanding of the world, Jews are condemned to a state of carnality and spiritual blindness that reflects their ‘moral error and intellectual dimness’.8 And Jewish blindness is frequently figured as a veil or shadow over the eye. Peter Damian speaks of the Jews’ ‘veil of ignorance’ (ignorantiae velamen) when he writes: ‘With the vision of so many heavenly stars sparkling before you, Jew, I marvel how such deep shades of blindness [densae tenebrae caecitatis] can hold sway, even in eyes that are totally without sight’.9 Pope Innocent IV, in a 1244 letter to the French king, speaks of ‘the wicked perfidy of the Jews, from whose hearts our Redeemer has not removed the veil of blindness because of the enormity of their crime, but has so far permitted to remain in blindness’.10 The Jewish veil of ignorance is sometimes figured as a physical obstruction covering the eye. When Saul was confronted by a blinding light of God on the road to Damascus, he lost his power of sight for three days. But when he converted to Christianity, ‘immediately something like scales [squamae] fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized’.11 In addition to scales, the image of a white film over the eye is another common figure of Jewish blindness in the medieval West. Peter Alfonsi, a Jewish convert to Christianity in the twelfth century, describes his conversion experience as the removal of the white veil covering his eyes: ‘The omnipotent one inspired us with his Spirit, and directed me into the straight path, removing first the thin white film covering the eyes [tenuem … albuginem oculorum] and afterwards the heavy veil of the corrupt soul [grave corrupti animi velamentum]’.12 Kruger argues that Peter describes the removal of his veil of obfuscation in terms that evoke medieval theories of allegoresis, which figures interpretation as the removal of the outer chaff that reveals the kernel of truth.13 In another medieval story of Jewish blindness, the Jew Tobit is struck with blindness for his spiritual recalcitrance. When his son, Tobias, seeks a cure, the angel Raphael appears to him in a dream and teaches him how to restore his father’s eyesight. When Tobias applies a fish’s gall to Tobit’s eyes, ‘a white film like the skin of an egg’ peels off Tobit’s eyes.14 The Venerable Bede glosses the white film over Tobit’s eyes as denoting ‘the folly of

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self-​indulgence’.15 Premodern whiteness, as associated with medieval Jews, is a veil that connotes both corporeal and spiritual blindness. It is the milky white clouds of cataract, the removal of which would restore bodily sight and signal spiritual conversion. Whiteness is simultaneously a lack and an impediment. What both the historical Peter Alfonsi and the fictional Tobit suffer from, before their respective conversion and healing, is abjection in the form of white blindness. In medieval art and literature, the veil of Jewish ignorance is frequently depicted as a blindfold over the eyes of the allegorical figure Synagoga. Michael Camille has pointed out that the feminine Synagoga, in contradistinction to the allegorical Ecclesia, is both blindfolded and ‘constructed as an anti-​image, a pseudo-​ idol specifically for the purpose of being toppled at the moment of the crucifixion’.16 Sometimes, Synagoga’s eyes are covered by a serpent, an allusion to the alliance between Jews and the devil. In other visualisations, Synagoga is not only blindfolded but wears a turban, suggesting the foreignness associated with European Jews, despite the fact of their long existence in the West.17 While Synagoga is not literally present in Passus XX of Piers Plowman, she lurks behind Longinus. Derek Pearsall suggests that Langland’s depiction of Longinus as a Jew ‘demonstrates that an individual Jew received sight (i.e. was converted) at the very moment that the Synagogue (i.e. Jewry, represented in medieval art as a blindfolded female figure) received the blindfold’.18 As the eyes of one Jew are unveiled, the collective Jewry remains veiled by spiritual darkness. Langland’s rendition of Longinus’s healing and conversion also alludes to the trope of Jewish blindness as a white film over the eye. His piercing of Christ’s side parallels the ancient and medieval medical procedures for removing cataract from the eye. Alhazen called cataract ‘a dense opaque fragment’ placed within the ‘albugineous humor’ of the eye.19 In one of the typical operations for cataract removal, a sharp instrument is inserted through the cornea of the patient, forcing the lens of the eye out of its place and down to the bottom of the eye.20 When his spear ‘bar hym [Christ] thorw the herte’ (20.88), and Christ’s ‘bloed sprang down by the spere and vnspered’ (20.89) his eyes, Longinus pierces his eyes vicariously through the body of Christ and removes his own white film

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of spiritual darkness. While Longinus’s spear might ‘assum[e]‌a sacral quality because it enters Christ’ (57), it is Christ’s blood that becomes the instrument of mercy and conversion.21 The physicalisation of Jewish errors is a biopoliticisation of Jewish difference. Giorgio Agamben has distinguished the Greek notion of zoē from that of bíos. Zoē, the bare life, is the ‘simple fact of living common to all living beings’, while bíos indicates ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’.22 When zoē is converted to bíos, physical life becomes subsumed under a system of socio-​economic and political control. And one of the objectives of biopolitics, Agamben argues, is to convert the bare life into an ‘object of aid and protection’.23 In the language of Christian theology, this biopolitical conversion takes the form of Christian mercy. After his healing and conversion, Longinus ‘criede Iesu mercy’ (20.90). Ironically, the visual focus in the moment of Longinus’s healing and conversion is not on his body but rather on Christ’s body as an agent of mercy and conversion. As Beckwith argues, the body of Christ functioned in the Middle Ages as ‘a basic metaphor for pre-​modern theorizing about the social order’.24 Christ’s body is the sacralisation of the Aristotelian conception of the body politic, a body that is simultaneously the Eucharistic host and the whole of Christian society. While Beckwith highlights Christ’s body as the site of social contests and negotiations, her analysis is primarily limited to the tensions between laity and the priesthood, i.e. among Christians. Piers Plowman’s focus on the blind Jew Longinus in Passus XX, I argue, steers the thinking about Christ’s body and the working of the social in a different direction. Langland’s imagined community includes not only ideal Christians but also others such as the blind, the Jews and, as will be discussed later, the potentially problematic masculine bodies in the guise of black devils. The constellation that makes up the social body, as depicted in Passus XX, exemplifies what Hardt and Negri term the ‘multitude’: ‘a set of singularities … whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different’.25 These irreducible singularities of the multitude shift the terms of social analysis away from the all-​consuming and singular body of Christ and towards the bodies of singularities in biopolitical terms, as zoē and bíos. As Langland visualises the body politics of his ‘fair feld ful of folk’, these singularities –​blindness,

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Jewishness, blackness –​would disrupt any attempt at a unified and coherent biopolitical community. That is, the fair field is full of precarious bodies that do not conform easily to the ideal Christian social body. Conversion implicates body and its capacity for labour. Jews have always functioned as ‘the living symbol … of the bare life’ in the Western imaginary.26 Both Jews and the blind were accused of greed and laziness: Jews because of their usury, and the blind, begging. For both groups, their bodies were conceived as incomplete, and their money as earned not through physical labour.27 The Alsatian abbot Geiler of Kaiserberg attacks the Jews’ suspect labour: ‘Are the Jews, then, better than Christians, that they will not work with their hands? … Making money by usury is not working; it is flaying others while themselves remaining idle’.28 The word ‘flaying’ in Geiler’s accusation links Jews’ usury to the violent skinning of Christians’ bodies; the Jews’ suspect labour is injurious to the Christian body politic. The flaying of Christians also evokes the medieval image of Jews as the torturers and killers of Christ, who becomes a literal and metaphoric stretched skin nailed on the cross like a piece of parchment or drumskin. The question of the political-​economic usefulness of bare life (zoē) is a question of the body’s role in the biopolitical collective, beyond existing simply as an object of mercy. Blindness, a disability that highlights the suspect status of a seemingly useless bare life (zoē), is at the centre of the biopolitics in Piers Plowman. In fact, there was great anxiety in the late Middle Ages over false beggars who feigned disabilities in order to avoid labour. In Passus XIII of the C-​text, Langland calls out wasters who feign blindness and refuse to work for Piers (8.128–​ 30). In some medieval French plays, Longinus is characterised as a beggar.29 In the thirteenth-​century drama Résurrection du Sauveur, Longinus cannot make enough money from begging and succumbs to the demand of the Roman soldiers that he pierce the body of Christ in exchange for money.30 Longinus becomes a second Judas. Sartorial identity markers were often forced upon beggars and Jews in the Middle Ages. In a number of cities, beggars had to wear badges as insignia of their status, thereby visually and socially linked to Jews, who were required to wear badges on their clothing so that Christians could more easily discern their true spiritual and

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physical identity. In 1217, King Henry III decreed that Jews in England should wear on their outer garment a piece of white linen or parchment in the shape of the tabula, the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.31 The decree was in concert with the Church’s effort, after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, towards ever stricter sartorial regulations of the religious others living within the borders of Western Christendom. The whiteness of the tabula visually conjures up the white film of pagan blindness and the blindfold over Synagoga’s eyes; the Jews in England wore their veil of ignorance on their breast. The Jewish body is a precarious body. The medieval anxiety over the incomplete bodies of the blind and the Jews marks the failure of these bodies at full socio-​economic integration. Conversion and miraculous cure in theory facilitate the integration into Christian society and economy; these acts effectively force the marginalised to lose their marginal identities.32 This would mean that the convert and the cured must now engage in proper labour: the blind must stop begging and join the workforce as an able body, and the converted Jew must give up usury. As for Longinus, his cure converts his disabled body into a potential labouring body. His submission of his land and body to Jesus indicates his willingness to participate in the biopolitical life of the Christian community. Longinus cries out to the crucified Christ: ‘Sore hit me forthenketh! /​Of þe dede þat Y haue do y do me in зoure grace. /​Bothe my lond and my licame at зoure likynge taketh hit, /​And huae mercy on me, riзtfol Iesu’ [Sorely I repent it, /​For the deed that I have done, I do place myself in your grace. /​Both my land and my body take at your liking, /​And have mercy on me, rightful Jesus] (20.92–​95).33 At least on the level of representation, his miraculous cure allows for the fantasy of the convertibility of a disabled, Jewish body. Yet Longinus remains marked by his status as an exceptional Jew, and his conversion is made possible largely by his blindness. As for the majority of the intractable Jews, the personified Faith condemns them to a loss of their ‘franchise’ (20.107) and a life in ‘thraldoem’ (20.107). Book, another personification in the poem, warns the Jews of their pending demise unless they convert. The Jews of Passus XX, with the exception of Longinus, function solely as the persecutors of Christ. Faith accuses the ‘false Iewes’ (20.96)

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of forcing the blind Longinus to beat the dead Jesus and calls the act ‘a vyl vilanye’ (20.98) and unchivalric (20.100–2). Faith’s accusation, that the Jews ‘made þe blynde bete the dede’ (20.98), alludes to a common late medieval association between disability, the Jews, the buffeting of Christ in the Passion and the game of Blind Man’s Buff. As Joseph Strutt explains, Blind Man’s Buff –​alternatively known as Hoodman Blind or Hot Cockles –​is a game in which a player is blindfolded and buffeted by other players until he can catch one of them. When that happens, the player caught becomes blindfolded in turn and the game continues.34 The game is illustrated on folios 130r and 130v of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, where a player (a boy) wears his hood backwards so he cannot see. In Paul B. Newman’s interpretation, the scene illustrated the other boys carrying their hoods and using them to hit the blindfolded boy. While the goal of the blindfolded boy is to grab the hoods away from the other players and avoid being hit, the other players’ goal is to buffet the blindfolded boy as long as possible before being caught.35 To me, the hood used by the game’s participants resonates poignantly with the blindfold over Synagoga’s eyes and with the white film over the eyes of the recalcitrant Jews. The association of the buffeting of Christ and the Jews in the Middle Ages is not surprising: the physical striking of one of the players signifies Jewish violence towards the crucified God, and the material hood symbolises the Jews’ blindness. In one late medieval sermon, the homilist portrays Christ during the Passion as ‘betun and buffetid, scorned and scourgid, that unnethis [scarcely] was ther left only hoole platte [any intact piece] of his skyn, fro the top to the too [toe], that a man myзte have sette in the point of a nedil’.36 And John Bromyard, in his Summa Predicantium, compares false counsellors to ‘the Jews who buffeted Christ when blindfolded’ and links them to ‘those who, in still playing that game, smite someone on the head smartly while his face is hidden’.37 The deliberate association of the game of Blind Man’s Buff with Christ’s passion is also a prominent feature of many late medieval Passion plays. In the York play Peter Denies Jesus: Jesus Examined by Caiaphas, for instance, one of the soldiers at the crucifixion tells Caiaphas: ‘Sertis, will ye sitte and sone schall ye see /​Howe we

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schall play popse for the pages prowe’ [Certes, will ye sit and soon shall ye see /​how we shall play pops [a kind of buffeting game] for the wretch’s benefit] (354–​5).38 Immediately, another soldier says that he has ‘a hatir to hyde hym [Christ]’ [a piece of cloth to blindfold him] (357). In Lollard and Wycliffite’s attacks on Passion plays, the affinity among drama, Jews and the Blind Man’s Buff is the main problem underpinning late medieval English performance culture: siche miraclis pleying is scorning of God, for right as ernestful leving of that that God biddith is dispising of God … as diden the Jewis that bobbiden Crist, thanne, sithen thes miraclis pleyeris taken in bourde [jest] the ernestful werkis of God, no doute that ne they scornen God as diden the Jewis that bobbiden Crist, for they lowen [roar] at his passioun as these lowyn and japen [mocking] of the miraclis of God.39

The actors (‘miraclis pleyeris’), by taking in jest (‘taken in bourde’) the work of God, are effectively equated with the Jews who struck Christ (‘Jewis that bobbiden Crist’) at the crucifixion. Passion plays are ‘feinyd miraclis’ through which ‘men bygilen hemsilf and dispisen God, as the tormentours that bobbiden Crist’.40 Here, it is Christ who wears the blindfold and suffers the violent blows of the Jews’ spiritual corruption. But if the Christ figure in late medieval Passion plays suffers from the white blindness of the Jews, he himself, as I shall discuss later, wears a radically different skin of whiteness on his body that re-​ inscribes and re-​signifies his bodily suffering.

Black mask, white skin The nexus of Jews, blindness and violence in the Passion posits whiteness as a veil of Jewish ignorance and recalcitrance. As Passus XX progresses, Langland moves quickly from the Passion to the Harrowing of Hell, and in the process shifts his cultural allusions from the figurative skin of spiritual blindness of the Jews to the literal skins and fabrics of theatrical costumes used in late medieval England, especially in the performance of urban civic religious drama, including passion plays associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi.41 In Passus XVII, Langland mentions the ‘clerkes in Corpus

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Cristi feste [who] syngen and reden’ (17.120). Langland scholars have noted the resonances between the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell in Passus XX of Piers Plowman and those found in late medieval Passion drama.42 Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, in their introduction to The Harrowing of Hell in the York cycle, note that the York play has ‘more than a passing resemblance to the climactic Harrowing of Hell scene in Piers Plowman’.43 Likewise, Stephen Barney argues that Passus XX, especially the episode of the Devil’s Parliament, has sources and analogues in medieval plays of both English and French origins, in devil-​lore, and in the Gospel of Nicodemus.44 The exotic and comic names for devils –​such as Belial, Baal, Beelzebub and Astaroth –​can be found in French drama and English Passion cycles. David M. Bevington, in his reading of the Harrowing of Hell in the English cycles, similarly interprets Satan’s fellow demons as ‘comic in much the same ludicrous vein as their master: they raise the alarm in noisy panic, shore up useless defences against Christ’s entry, and turn on one another in an orgy of mutual recriminations’.45 In Passus XX of Piers Plowman, Langland too portrays Satan’s rallying cry as similarly farcical in tone and image to that found in the cycle plays. Upon anticipation of Christ’s arrival at the gate of hell, Langland’s Satan shouts out: Ac arise vp, Ragamoffyn, and areche me alle þe barres That Belial thy beel-​syre beet with thy dame, And Y shal lette this loerd and his liht stoppe. Ar we thorw brihtnesse be blente, go barre we þe зates. Cheke we and cheyne we and vch a chine stoppe, That no liht lepe in at louer ne at loupe. Astarot, hoet out, and haue out oure knaues, Coltyng and al his kyn, the castel to saue. Brumstoen boylaunt brennyng out cast hit Al hoet on here hedes þat entrith ney þe walles. Setteth bowes of brake and brasene gonnes, And sheteth out shot ynow his sheltrom to blende. Set Mahound at þe mongenel and mullestones throweth And with crokes and kalketrappes acloye we hem vchone! (20.281–​94) [But rise up, Ragamoffyn, and hand to me all the bars That Belial your grandfather built with your mother,

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And I shall hinder this lord and stop his light. Before we are blinded by the brightness, let us go bar the gates! Let’s check and chain and stop every chink, That no light leaps in through the louver or the loophole. Astarot, call out, and have out our lads, Coltyng and his kin, and save the castle. Boiling brimstone pour it out burning All hot on their heads that enter near the walls. Set cross-​bows and brazen guns, And shoot out enough shot to blind his body of armed troops. Set Mahound on the siege-​engine for hurling stones and throw out millstones And with hooks and caltraps let’s impede every one!]

This passage is found only in the C-​text but not in the A-​or B-​text of Piers Plowman. Satan’s speech in the C-​text, I argue, indexes Langland’s engagement with the dramatic culture of late medieval England. Barney speculates: ‘Does [the addition in the C-​ text] embody [Langland’s] response to a viewing of some Corpus Christi play, or reading a French Passion play, after he issued the B version?’46 Whether or not Langland had witnessed the Corpus Christi ceremony, procession and/​or civic religious plays, I contend that any reading of Passus XX must take into consideration the rich theatrical and performance contexts that form part of the cultural matrix of the poem. Langland’s representation of the devils in Passus XX might also allude to performance practices associated with mummings, in addition to civic religious drama. Theatre historians have pointed out that in the late Middle Ages, devils and black souls were frequently played by men in blackface and black masks.47 The use of black and white colours to depict the blessed and the damned is common in medieval Christian visual vocabulary. As Meg Twycross points out, whereas whiteness denotes ‘the claritas of the blessed’, blackness signifies the absence of divine light.48 In medieval popular masking games, blackface is achieved through household materials such as soot, lampblack or charcoal. In addition to the blackening of the face, actors playing devils also wore grotesque masks with horns, animal skins and feathers, while wielding various instruments of torture.49

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If masks conceal, they also offer an opportunity for wearers to manipulate the presentation and reception of their masked identities. Claire Sponsler, examining at the seasonal festivities of mummings and morris dances, suggests that the blackening of men’s faces produces labouring-​class masculinity by marking the labouring men’s lower status vis-​à-​vis ‘an order grounded on (white) male, aristocratic privilege’.50 Blackface, as a trope of otherness and deviance, visualises class-​and gender-​based differences by covering up the white skin of male labourers; epidermal whiteness does not automatically signify white privilege. There were significant socio-​ economic differences among low-​status labourers, rural and urban, and members of urban craft guilds, as well as differences among artisans themselves and those between artisans and merchants. But as Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano observe, artisans included ‘a large, heterogeneous body of workers’, and the division between master craftsmen and labourers was not a hard and fast one.51 The actors in the Passion plays were sometimes professional or semi-​professional players, and sometimes amateur artisans and labourers.52 Langland’s depiction of boisterous devils in Passus XX participates in the late medieval theatrical tradition that represents the demonic as grotesque, bestial, unruly and black –​be they played by artisans or actors. Reading Passus XX, one hears in Satan’s rallying cries the voices of late medieval English male labourers in blackface and masks registering their defiance. Satan insists on protecting the blackness of Hell, seeking to buttress Hell from the light of Christ (286).53 Rice and Pappano further highlight the overlaps of and parallels between artisan work and dramatic craft; both are bodily disciplines that use the body as ‘instrument, monitor, and material’.54 Artisanal epistemology, like that of acting, is rooted in the body; the artisanal body is the performing body, and vice versa. In passion drama, this body is also a precarious body performing its own precarity. Culturally and historically, figurations of blindness overlap with those of Jewishness, of darkness and of devils. Medieval Jews, frequently represented as possessing horns and tails, are linked to devils.55 Devils are aligned both with blackness, racialised through dermal pigmentation, and with spiritual blindness, as Langland draws attention to the devils’ fear of blinding by the light of Christ.

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Performing blindness therefore conjures up performing Jewishness, which in turn evokes the performance of devils, blackness and labouring masculinity. What emerges is a social fabric of interlocking and mutually resonating performance practices enmeshed and enacted in Passus XX of Piers Plowman. In the two halves of Passus XX –​the Jews in the Passions and the devils in the Harrowing of Hell –​each conjures the spectre of the other. This is the multitude whose difference cannot be reduced or erased. The blinding of Lucifer by Jesus, when ‘liht hym ablende’ (20.368), re-​enacts the blindness of Synagoga and of all the Jews. The body, for Agamben, is ‘always already a biopolitical body and bare life’.56 The act of blinding and the act of healing are both acts of power. While Longinus is healed, Lucifer becomes a disabled, useless and inconvertible body; emphatically Jewish, Longinus’s physical blindness confirms his damaged spiritual state. Within the textualised performance space of Passus XX, the labouring bodies in blackface are acting up and acting out the problematic zoē, the bare life that refuses to be converted into useful biopolitical bodies. Cultural and literary representations mirror historical realities. In the late Middle Ages, craft guilds frequently excluded the disabled. The Coventry Weaver’s guild, for example, limited apprenticeships to men who possessed all their limbs.57 The Jews, also excluded from the guilds and expelled from England in 1290, were expected to work apart from Christians.58 As for the converted Jews, they remained outsiders and maintained their uneasy relationship to labour.59 In the commingling of Jewishness, blindness, devils and the Passion, what is foregrounded is the body of Christ; the Word incarnate becomes a central focus in the final passus of Piers Plowman. The personified Book invokes ‘godes body’ (20.241) as he bears witness to Christ’s powers, and during the Crucifixion, Will notes that there was ‘no boie so bold godes body to touche’ (20.78). Christ’s tortured body mirrors Longinus’s blind, Jewish body: a disabled body that cannot engage in proper physical or spiritual labour. Yet in salvation history, Christ’s body diverges from that of Longinus as it undergoes a biopoliticisation through the crucifixion, converting his zoē into bíos. The body of Christ stands at precisely the junction between blind Judaism and seeing Christianity. Within

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Passus XX of Piers Plowman, his body is the hinge between the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell, converting disability into functional wholeness. As junction and hinge, Christ’s body traverses boundaries in Christian history. And as the figural and literal body that unveils the divine truth of spiritual salvation hidden behind the veil of human ignorance and recalcitrance, Christ’s body functions as what Beckwith terms ‘a traverse of inside and outside … the striving towards an inside dynamically recodes what may be understood by the outside’.60 Upon the cross, Christ’s flesh is synecdochised in the skin that Longinus pierces and from which flows the divine blood that opens Longinus’s eyes; the interior fluid of the divine body is externalised through the pierced membrane of the human flesh. In Beckwith’s analysis, ‘the metaphorization of the skin as a bodily costume indicates the way in which exteriority and interiority are outrageously inverted in such imagery’.61 I would further contend that the skin as a bodily costume is simultaneously metaphoric and literal. If Christ’s suffering body is the visual focus of public spectacles, then one must take seriously the theatrical practice in which the actors playing Christ sometimes wore a white leather body-​suit that signified the body of Christ. It is not the actor’s body but the skin of the white leather suit that is the traverse of inside and outside. The use of whiteness to represent Christ’s crucified body on the cross was a fairly standard practice in the medieval West. In The Harrowing of Hell from the York cycle, the Moses character speaks of Christ’s radiant face during the Transfiguration: ‘Whyte as snowe was his body, /​And his face like to þe sonne to sight’ (89–​90).62 And in the same episode from the Towneley cycle, Moses alludes to Christ’s complexion in almost exactly the same words as those in the York cycle: ‘As whyte as snaw was his body /​His face was like the son for bright’.63 In a Middle English devotional poem, ‘A Song of Love-​longing to Jesus’, attributed to the school of Richard Rolle by Carleton Brown, the poet speaks of Christ’s ‘fayre schynyng’ (24), and of how ‘Whyte was his naked breste, & rede his blody syde’ (37).64 Curiously, the poet alludes not to Longinus’s blindness but to Christ’s own blindness as a result of torture: ‘Blynded was his faire ene, his flesch blody for-​bette’ (41).

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Leo Steinberg has noted that, before the fourteenth century, the crucified Christ was almost always represented with a loincloth, however thick or translucent, for the sake of decorum. It was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that artists began to ‘risk representing the full nakedness’ of Christ that included visualisation of his genitals.65 The partial veiling of Christ’s body in visual art indexes a persistent and widespread anxiety over public displays of naked flesh in medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for instance, Thomas of Chabham condemned the exposure of human flesh by actors in his penitential manual: ‘Some indeed transform and transfigure their bodies by means of shameful dances or shameful gestures, or by shameful stripping their bodies naked, or by putting on shameful masks’.66 As a solution to the problem of indecent exposure of live human flesh in theatre, medieval actors wore garments or leather suits to simulate nudity. Actors playing Adam and Eve were clad in body stockings or leotards and tights.67 The English stage-​directions to the Cornish Creation of the World called for Adam and Eve to be ‘aparlet in whytt lether’ and that ‘garmentis of skynnes to be geven to Adam and Eve by the angell’.68 And in Norwich, the white leather garments, also called ‘lybkleidern’, were described as ‘cote[s]‌’ and ‘hosen’ that had been ‘steyned’.69 In addition to the characters of Adam and Eve, actors playing God and Christ also wore a white leather garment, sometimes with a gilded face. What did the whitlether suit look like? Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter speculate that it might have resembled the Death costumes used in the 1637 dramatic presentation of Niklaus Manuel’s wall painting of the Dance of Death, as shown in Bern, Historisches Museum, no.743; however, the Christ costume would be more tight-​fitting to better simulate human flesh.70 According to the Middle English Dictionary, ‘whitlether’ is a ‘piece of leather treated with alum to yield a stiff, white leather able to be further treated to soften it’.71 The Middle English ‘whit’, in fact, could signify metonymically ‘white clothing [and] white fabric’. In the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘whiteleather’ denotes ‘soft, pliant leather of a natural, light colour, produced by dressing with alum and salt’.72 The Middle English ‘tauen’ means to ‘treat (a skin or hide) with alum and salt to produce a supple white leather’; somewhat

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more ghastly is the alternate meaning of ‘tauen’ as the turning of human skin into leather.73 Stella Mary Newton notes that among the properties listed in the 1339 inventory of the confraternity Dei Disciplinati di Perugia in Italy was a flesh-​coloured leather garment for the actor playing Christ.74 In England, the York Mercers paid in 1433 for a Christ tunic that displayed the marks of his Passion, ‘a sirke [shirt] wounded’.75 The inventory of the 1452 Coventry Smiths’ Passion play recorded ‘vj skynnes of whitleder to Godds garment’.76 In 1498, the Smiths’ inventory entered money paid ‘for sowyng of gods kote of leddur and for makyng of the hands to the same kote’.77 ‘Kote’, Twycross and Carpenter explain, suggests a close-​fitting body-​suit with matching gloves.78 Later in sixteenth-​ century Kent, a payment of four shillings and eight pence was made in 1555 ‘ “to burton for skynes for the ij godheddes Coote & for making” and two shillings “for di” dosyn shepeskynes for y godheddes coote for the iiijth playe’.79 Leather was essential and ubiquitous in the Middle Ages. In an age without artificial textile, rubber or plastic, animal skins were of paramount importance in daily life.80 Medieval laws dealt explicitly with ownership of dead animals and regulated the proprietorship and traffic in valuable hides. In Anglo-​Saxon laws, for instance, King Ethelred ‘required that someone keep the hide of a slain ox for three nights until witnesses could ascertain that the dead ox was in fact the property of the man in possession of it’.81 As Heather Swanson documents, the leather industry in medieval towns was huge; in Maryanne Kowaleski’s study, leather craftsmen made up at least the third largest occupational group.82 Changes in medieval diet led to the increased consumption of meat, which paralleled the increased consumption of leather products. Moreover, fashion trends in the late Middle Ages –​such as the allure associated with pointed shoes, long boots and belted gowns –​also fuelled the rising demand for leather.83 There were two main methods for processing animal skins. In tanning, a wet process, cow and ox hides were soaked in woozes for up to nine months; the result was a ‘red leather’ unsuitable for working and which had to be curried first. Currying involved the thinning down and application of tallow on leather, rendering it more flexible. Curried leather was known as ‘black leather’. In tawing, a dry process, oil or alum with a

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mixture of salt was rubbed into sheepskin and other non-​bovine hides, which produced a soft ‘white leather’. Hence, tawers were also known as ‘whittawers’, who were usually associated with other craftsmen who manufactured soft leather.84 The use of alum and salts in tawing is analogous to the whitening of pearls in the Middle Ages. The expansion of the leather industry led to greater specialisations, as tanning was generally divided into heavy and light depending on the particular uses of the animal skin. The proliferation of the leather trade resulted in the formation of leather-​related craft guilds, and there was great competition over animal skins and rivalry between tanners and cordwainers (shoemakers), which often spilled into performances of civic religious drama in places like York and Chester.85 For several centuries, in fact, the ‘whit teueres’ were an important guild in England, having received its charter in 1346.86 But despite their number, medieval leather workers were relatively low in social status. In Norwich, for instance, no tanner ever held a city office, and the tanners were ranked low during the city’s Corpus Christi procession.87 In drawing attention to the socio-​economic importance of leather, as well as of the use of blackface and black masks in late medieval ritual and dramatic culture, I do not wish to suggest that Langland wilfully wrote the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell episodes in Passus XX as dramatic texts. I would contend that there were deeply entrenched and widespread visual and performance traditions that were readily available to readers of Piers Plowman. That is, for Langland’s late medieval audiences, the figure of Christ as an actor in a whitlether suit was part and parcel of their religious culture and visual vocabulary –​their signifying matrix. The signs of the devils and of Christ in Passus XX could thus function as triggers of richly layered visual and performance praxes, like mnemonic triggers of memory. In fact, as Will witnesses the Passion within his dream in Passus XX, he is not so different from a spectator of passion plays and Corpus Christi processions or cycle drama, a mobile body wandering among various stages, stations or tableaux in the civic body politic. The colour of the white leather suit that medieval Christ-​actors put on is not exactly the colour white one may normally know or

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expect today. Like parchment, the colour of tawed leather used in theatrical ‘whytt Sollskotts’ or Christ costumes ranged in shades from cream to off-​white, sometimes even turning to yellow.88 But the fact that people in the late Middle Ages called the leather suit ‘whit’ suggests, firstly, that there is a cognitive divide between colour perception and naming. Secondly, premodern whiteness as a phenomenon was never something singular or monolithic; in fact, ‘white’ embraced a spectrum of colours. Thirdly, the perceptual diversity embodied by ‘white’ suggests that in the late Middle Ages, the significance of whiteness did not reside simply in the literal colour of the skin, living or flayed. As Alfred J. López notes, there are ‘gradations of whiteness’ and ‘ “white” skin alone does not make one white’.89 Rather, what is significant in the conjuration of whiteness, López contends, is its functions as the implicit and explicit normative imprint. For the late Middle Ages, the whitlether suit of Christ signifies the tacit normative status of Christianity, one that is literally skin-​deep.

Leather incarnate The figuration of humanity or its flesh as clothing is an ancient one.90 Augustine speaks of Christ as ‘a God clothed in flesh’ (deum carne indutum).91 In the fifth-​ century Christmas laud ‘O solis ortus cardine’ by Sedulius, Christ clothes himself in a human body (corpus induit). Similarly, in the sixth-​century hymn for Christmas, ‘Jesu, Redemptor omnium’, Jesus’ birth is figured as a putting on of clothing: ‘Being born, you put on [our] form’ (Nascendo, formam sumpseris).92 More than clothing, the incarnation is conceived explicitly as a textual and epidermal event. For the thirteenth-​ century Pierre Bersuire, ‘Christus nomine est quidam liber scriptus in pelle virginea et in camera virginis gloriose digitis spiritus sancti’ [Christ is a certain book written on the Virgin’s skin and in the womb of the glorious Virgin by the fingers of the Holy Spirit].93 Mary’s womb, Marlene Villalobos Hennessy observes, is ‘implicitly compared to the animal skins’.94 The metaphor of Christ with the skin of human nature, however, takes on a darker tone for the Passion iconography. Ludolph of Saxony, in Vita Christi, pictures Christ ‘harshly stretched on the cross as if His body had been a

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hide’ (crudeliter expansus et tractus, strictissime in modum pellis hinc inde est extensus).95 In a medieval account of the Passion in Low German, the author compares Christ’s skin to that of a drum being tightened and struck: Then they took Jesus and bound Him with strings to a table that was somewhat longer than He was. And they turned the table upside down so that Jesus hung suspended beneath, and they went to sit and drink and make merry, setting the tankards from which they drank on the same table beneath which Jesus was bound. Thus, the blessed Jesus was on one side of the table, bound pitifully taut like a sheep, with His holy body hanging down towards the ground.96

The imagery derives from Augustine, who in Enarrationes in psalmos compares Christ to a stretched drumskin: ‘Et quoniam qui crucifigitur, in ligno extenditur; ut autem tympanum fiat, caro, id est corium, in ligno extenditur: dictum est, et tympanizabat, id est crucifebatur, in ligno extendebatur [And because whoever is crucified is extended upon wood, and that to make a drum, flesh –​that is, skin –​is stretched on wood, therefore it is said, He drummed, that is, He was crucified, He was stretched upon wood]’.97 And Odo of Cheriton (d. 1247) compares the crucified Christ to a child’s abecedary: ‘sic caro Christi vel pellis extensa in cruce’ [In just this way, the flesh, or the skin, of Christ was stretched out upon the cross].98 Christ’s skin becomes a synecdoche of the living body sacrificed on the cross. The Gesta Romanorum notes that ‘Christus non tantum pellem in sede crucis pro nobis dedit, sed eciam vitam’ [Christ did not only give his skin for us on the cross, but also his life].99 But beyond the synecdoche of the human skin or the trope of drumskin, it was the figure of the crucified Christ as a piece of parchment skin that carried the most valences in the late Middle Ages. As Vincent Gillespie observes, the Christ-​Book ‘was something of a theological commonplace’ in the Middle Ages, part of what Ernst Robert Curtius calls the ‘religious metaphorics of the book’.100 The widespread topos of God as the author of the Book of Nature and the Book of the Holy Scripture, Richard Firth Green argues, led to the ‘image of the suffering Christ as a crucified charter or book spread out upon the writing desk of the cross and lettered with the ink of his blood’.101 Tracking the genealogy of

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Christian blood piety, in which Christ’s crucified body is imagined as a somatic book, Hennessy also notes that ‘[a]‌s the Middle Ages progressed, the trope of Christ’s blood as ink became related to a whole network of associations that featured Christ as a living, speaking, and often bleeding book’.102 In the anonymous Middle English meditation The Privity of the Passion, for instance, the author speaks of Christ ‘sprede o-​brode one þe crosse more straite þan any parchemyne-​skyne es sprede one þe harowe’.103 And in the Meditation on the Life and Passion of Christ, the anonymous poet sees the crucified Christ as the personified Love who writes on the white skin of parchment: ‘Loue, I pray þe eftsones writ /​Þe rede blode, on skyn so whit, /​Gronynge, sykynge, serwe, and care, /​And shame to stonde naked bare’ (1527–​30).104 Richard Rolle, in the Meditations on the Passion of Christ, similarly compares the Passion to the medieval production of parchment skin: Now, swete Ihesu, me þynketh I se þy body on þe rode [cross] al blody, and streyned þat ioyntes twynnen; þe woundes now opyn, þy skyn al to-​drawen recheth [stretched] so brode, þy hede corowned with þornes, þy body al woundes, nailled in þy handes and fete so tendyr, and in þe synwes þer as is most peynful felynges. Þer is no lennynge for þy hede; þy body is streyned as a parchemyn skyn vpon a rake; þy face is bolned [swollen] þat first was so fayre; þy ioyntes vndone; þou stondest and hongest on nayllys; stremes of blode ren doun by þe rode; þe syзt of þy modyr encresceth þy peyne.105

For Green, the religious and literary analogies among the parchment skin, the words of God and the physical body of Christ point to a premodern material culture that actively fetishised the written texts as objects of mystery and wonderment.106 The medieval was an orally based literary culture in which the written words were ‘potent artifacts’ and could carry ‘talismanic authority’.107 Some Christians wore strips of written parchment as amulets or remedies around their necks. Miri Rubin cites an incident in which an inscribed amulet is attributed with the power to stop the bleeding of a wounded or sick body if one appealed to Longinus for his intercession. The inscription reads: ‘Longinus: who pierced the side and had blood flow –​I dare you –​in the name of Jesus Christ, so

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that the blood of Margery will stop flowing’.108 In a strange twist of logic, Longinus, sometimes characterised as a disabled Jew in the medieval racial-​religious imaginary, became a quasi-​Christian saint with mediatory powers of healing.109 The late medieval literary work that best represents the Christ-​ Book tradition is The Charter of Christ, a poem that circulated in both long and short forms. All versions of the poem, Green argues, ‘turn Christ’s body into a specific deed of enfeoffment [that conveys] the seisin of heavenly bliss to humanity’.110 It is only in the longer version, however, that the metaphor of the crucified book is explicitly rendered. In the A-​text of the long Charter, Christ the narrator cannot find any permanent writing surface and must write out the deed of human salvation on his own skin: Ne myзte I fynde no parchemyn ffor to laston wel and fyn But as loue bad me do Myn owne skyn y зaf þerto. (A.51–​4)111

Christ’s skin as parchment is one that has undergone the processes of beating, washing and stretching out to dry on the cross: To a pyler I was plyзt I tugged and tawed al a nyзt And waschon in myn ovne blod And streyte y-​streyned vpon þe rod Streyned to drye vp-​on a tre As parchemyn oveth for to be. (A.75–​80)112

The word ‘tawed’ in line 86 is the source of one of the denotations of ‘tauen’ in the MED, meaning figuratively to ‘soften (Christ’s skin) by beating’.113 Here, the late medieval material culture of leather meets the religious and literary skin of Jesus. In the visual arts, an example of the Christ Charter imagery can be found on folio 23r of British Library, MS Addit. 37049, a fifteenth-​century Carthusian manuscript. Folio 23r illustrates the ‘Charter of human redemption’, in which Christ hangs nailed to the cross, next to the instruments of torture. The body of Christ is covered in bleeding wounds, and the red ink on the parchment heightens the visual and affective powers of the image. While Christ stretches out his arms, his hands hold open a written charter of human redemption. Spatially, the artist

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has placed the charter directly across Christ’s legs and genitals; the charter thereby also functions as a substitute loincloth –​a veil –​for the naked Christ that eroticises his body.114

Figure 3.1  ‘Charter of human redemption’. British Library, MS Addit. 37049, fol. 23r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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Piers Plowman circulated within the same late medieval cultural milieu that produced The Charter of Christ. As Emily Steiner notes, Piers Plowman is heavily invested in late medieval documentary culture, and written documents of all sorts abound throughout the poem: Meed’s charter, Truth’s pardon, Piers’s testament, Hawkyn’s quittance, Moses’ maundement and Peace’s patent.115 In Passus XIX of the C-​text, the allegorical Spes invokes the figure of the Charter of Christ: ‘y seke hym þat hath þe seel to kepe, /​The which is Crist and cristendoem and croes þer-​an yhanged’ (19.7–​8). Pearsall has glossed the image as representative of ‘the seal of Christ, which is hanging from the deed of contract, as seals did, in the form of a cross’.116 Later in Passus XX, Peace refers to human salvation as love letters from Christ: ‘Loue, þat is my lemman, such lettres he me sente /​That Mercy, my sustur, and Y mankynde shal saue’ (20.185–6). A few lines later, Peace again displays the patent of Christ: ‘Loo, here þe patente! … In pace in idipsum, /​And that this dede shal duyre, dormiam et requiescam’ (20.191–2). What Peace offers, through the figure of Christ as a parchment charter on the cross, is a ‘salvific legal document that opposes the blindly literalist legalism of the devils’.117 In her examination of Langland’s preoccupation with questions of literacy, legality and material culture in Piers Plowman, Steiner reads the various fictive documents in the poem as ‘ “key texts” in the construction of salvation history’ that reveal God’s contract of redemption with humanity.118 As a multitemporal archive and a progression of legal documents, Langland’s salvation history is an ‘enfolding’ of late medieval documentary discourses and reading practices that converge in the poem.119 Steiner, through the trope of enfolding, links the poem’s myriad documents to the figure of the skin. Just as Langland has folded the fictive documents into his poem, the documents themselves are keys to the unfolding of God’s divine plan. Malcolm Godden, in his reading of Langland’s account of the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell, has argued that ‘Langland’s vision is strikingly different from the treatment given in most Middle English writings … Langland presents the Passion as a triumphant battle fought by God with death and the devil … The dominant character is the dramatic celebration of the power and divinity of Christ, not his suffering humanity’.120 While it is true that Langland’s description of the Passion lacks the emphatically

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more affective language found in some of the late medieval passion drama and narratives, it nonetheless invokes the suffering of Christ. In light of the visual and performative traditions of the Passion to which Langland alludes in Passus XX, it is hard to read the passus without recognising the heightened affects produced by the scenes that unfold before Will the dreamer. In fact, Langland uses the word ‘soffre’ no less than ten times in Passus XX. As Peace explains, Christ’s incarnation is itself an act of suffering: ‘So god þat bigan al of his gode wille /​Bycam man of a mayde mankynde to saue, /​And soffred to be sold, to se þe sorwe of deynge, /​The which vnknytteth alle care, and comsyng [beginning] is of reste’ (20.221–4). Suffering is also necessary to the knowledge of well-​being: ‘For no wiht woet what wele is, þat neuere wo soffred’ [For no one knows well-​being who never suffered woe] (20.211). Lastly, through incarnation and crucifixion, Christ suffers in heaven, earth and hell, as Peace once again proclaims: And aftur, god auntred hymsulue and toek Adames kynde To wyte what he hath soffred in thre sundry places, Bothe in heuene and in erthe –​and now to helle he thenketh, To wyte what al wo is, þat woet of alle ioye. (20.231–​4)

Peace’s reiterative attachment to the word ‘soffre’, though lacking the graphic and violent imagery of the likes of Richard Rolle, nonetheless signals Langland’s engagement with Christ’s suffering as an affective state. Indeed, as Peace contends, ‘For no wiht woet what wele is, þat neuere wo soffred’ (20.211). For a poem so invested in medieval documentary culture, it would be difficult to dissociate its salvific documents from the affective piety of the Christ-​Book tradition. The Christ-​Book is a wearable white skin that is always performative. In the anonymous Middle English lyric ‘I would be Clad in Christis Skin’ from John of Grimestone’s 1372 compilation The Commonplace Book, the narrative voice sings of a desire to put on Christ’s skin on the cross: Gold & al þis werdis wyn Is nouth but cristis rode; I wolde ben clad in cristes skyn, Þat ran so longe on blode, & gon t’is herte & taken myn In–​

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Þer is a fulsum fode. Þan зef I litel of kith or kyn, For þer is alle gode. Amen.

[Gold and all this world’s pleasure Is nothing without Christ’s cross; I would be clad in Christ’s skin, That ran so long with blood, And go into his heart and take my lodging there–​ There is plentiful food. Then care I little of kith or kin, For there is all good. Amen.]121

The poet characterises the interiority beneath Christ’s skin as a sheltering domestic space that nurtures the body and soul. To put on Christ’s skin is to inhabit it. As Clifford Davidson suggests, the poem re-​enacts Christian identification with the suffering of Christ: ‘By transference, therefore, suffering becomes a personal duty, at its most extreme involving the desire to wrap oneself in Christ’s battered and bleeding skin’.122 Hennessy, likewise, reads the poem as portraying the union with Christ as ‘a kind of enfleshment: first wearing his bloody skin and then entering his heart, where the two hearts can be joined’.123 The poem in effect performs what Hennessy terms a ‘hermeneutics of embodiment’, an incarnational mode of reading in which the body of the reader is ‘the site of an empathic transformation, as both mirror and template, image and parchment’.124 The reader’s body, vicariously through the narrator, puts on and consumes the skin of Christ.

Integumental suffering Skin, Jay Prosser argues, is a site that registers and archives trauma; like parchment, the skin remembers the ‘detailed specificities of life histories’.125 For Prosser, the skin is both the material body and the psychic membrane, and ‘if damage to the material skin can be remembered psychically, damage to the psychic envelope can be remembered physically’.126 In the Middle English lyric, ‘I would be Clad in Christis Skin’, to be clothed in Jesus’ skin is to recall and experience Christ’s suffering. But the poet converts the mantle of suffering into nourishing food for the body (‘Þer is a fulsum fode’).

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The psychic envelope that Prosser theorises is what psychologist Didier Anzieu terms the Skin Ego, a concept he derives from Freud’s theory of the ego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud theorises that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’.127 For Anzieu, somatic and psychic functions are intertwined, and they are central to an individual’s sensory experience, embodiment and subjectivity. Reading Freud literally, Anzieu argues that the Skin Ego is ‘the projection in the psyche of the surface of the body, namely the skin, which makes up this sheet or interface’.128 During the first stage of the Skin Ego’s formation, the child imagines a common skin they share with the mother; there is no distinction between the world and the self. In the next two stages, the child recognises their own skin as separate from that of the mother’s, converts maternal care (a stand-​in for the external world) into psychic contents, and places them within the newly individuated Skin Ego. The Skin Ego is at once a protective sheet for the delineated subject, a communicative interface between the external and internal worlds, and a sac containing interiorised psychic objects. Pain, according to Anzieu, is a ‘topographical disturbance’ of the Skin Ego.129 The destabilising power of pain blurs and confuses the Skin Ego’s separate functions of protecting the ego and of inscribing the ego’s existence in the signifying order of language. For the Skin Ego in pain, the psychic gestures of shielding and writing grade into one another. That is, it is only through the inscription of wounds on its surface that the Skin Ego could manage the onslaught of pain. The shield must bear visible scars as evidence of its protective function. Trauma and protection emerge as interconnected but belated effects written on the Skin Ego, like a palimpsest. Survival, on the level of skin memories, is a constant reminder of one’s having faced pain and lived. The white leather skin-​suit and the Charter of Christ are palimpsestic skins that simultaneously record trauma and offer protective salvation to their readers and wearers. For the actors playing Christ in the medieval passion plays, they are literally wrapping themselves in a leather suit that signifies the skin of Christ scarred by the memories of the Passion. What they wear is a figurative garment of pain.

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Pain and suffering shape the protective psychic functions of the Skin Ego. The Skin Ego in pain is a ‘wrapping of suffering’, a term Anzieu borrows from Micheline Enrique, who further differentiates ‘the body of suffering’ (corps de souffrance) from ‘the body in abeyance’ (corps en souffrance), both of which characterise the masochistic envelope of the Skin Ego. The wordplay on souffrance in French is lost in English, Naomi Segal explains, because en souffrance ‘means “pending” or “in abeyance” (e.g., an outstanding debt, a payment in arrears, or an item awaiting delivery)’.130 The body of suffering is symptomatic of the psyche’s failure at finding identificatory pleasure in its exchanges with the Oedipal mother, the sign of the abject body. The psyche is hence kept alive by an ‘experience of suffering’.131 In order to survive and shape its subjectivity, the body of suffering must actively court and engage pain. The body in abeyance, on the other hand, is marked by passivity and is indicative of ‘the insufficiency of the common skin’ between the subject and others.132 That is, without a minimum of validation by others, the subject can at best survive, almost in a vegetative state, remaining en souffrance in endless deferral. The body in abeyance (corps en souffrance) is without an owner, emptied of affect, and incapable of representation or pleasure. It is without an owner and subject to the arbitrary powers of others. It lacks a secure sense of subjectivity and possesses an unstable identificatory mechanism. In its engagement with initiatory procedures, the body in abeyance is marked by ‘an extreme ability to act out, represent and incarnate suffering. This incarnation is an ordeal, a sacrifice, a Passion’.133 It is the capacity of the body in abeyance to embody and act out suffering that is at work in late medieval performances of Passion plays. The body of a male actor playing Christ, sheathed in a white leather suit, is the body in abeyance that enfleshes the Passion and brings the past into proximity with the present. That is, the performance is interpersonated insofar as the actor enfolds his body and psyche within the skin and pain of the divine Other. As such, the putting on of the leather skin-​ suit and the performance of the Passion are acts of reception that move from skin to text, to actor, and to the audience. But in the act of putting on the leather suit of Christ, a traffic in somatic skins and psychic envelopes takes place as well.

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The transition from the body in abeyance to the body of suffering is necessary to the subject’s metamorphosis from a passive medium to an active agent endowed with a healthy Skin Ego. The purpose of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient out of the state of paralysing suspension (en souffrance) and into the state of animating affection, though it may be an experience of bodily suffering (de souffrance). ‘I suffer therefore I am’, Anzieu claims, for ‘it is through suffering that the body acquires its status as a real object’.134 During therapy, the conversation between analyst and analysand forms a ‘skin of words’ that helps the patient lose their dependency on the biological skin, and touch is now psychic and no longer bodily: The skin of words harks back to the bath of speech in which the baby is immersed by people talking to it or by it crooning to them. Then, when the child develops the ability to think verbally, the skin of words provides a symbolic equivalent of the softness, suppleness, and relevance of contact by taking the place of the faculty of touch which has become impossible, forbidden or painful.135

Anzieu’s formulation of how the skin of words functions in psychoanalysis describes perfectly the workings of the Skin Ego as acts of reception. The analyst (as interpreter) works with the analysand (as text) to co-​produce the skin of words (as reading) that facilitates the analysand’s formation of an individuated, protective Skin Ego. In medieval contexts, the actor wearing the white leather suit symbolically moves from a body in abeyance (his own) to a body of suffering (Christ’s). A similar psychic process is at work in the Middle English lyric, ‘I would be Clad in Christis Skin’, in which the poetic subject actively desires to put on the skin of Christ, thereby enacting a transition from a body in abeyance that passively indulges in worldly pleasures to an active body of suffering that dwells within a skin of words figured as an abode of spiritual sustenance. Before I think through the whitlether suit and late medieval performance culture through Anzieu’s notion of the Skin Ego, I would like to examine briefly the skin as a veil in relation to the theory of integumentum in ancient and medieval hermeneutics of allegory and allegoresis. Twice in Passus XX, Langland describes the allegorical Peace as ‘in pacience yclothed’ (20.174). Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville have pointed out that integumentum as a rhetorical trope is associated with the Chartrian school in the twelfth

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century, especially with Guillaume de Conches and Bernardus Silvestris.136 The word integument is used in descriptions and interpretations of pagan texts, conceived as veils painted over by pagan authors and within which moral truths lie hidden. Other Latin figurative terms related to integument are involucrum (wrapping) and fabula. Macrobius, in the Commentarium in somnium Scipionis, compares fabulous narratives to the veil covering the natural world: sed quia sciunt inimicam esse naturae apertam nudamque expositionem sui, quae sicut vulgaribus hominum sensibus intellectum sui vario rerum tegmine operimentoque subtraxit, ita a prudentibus arcana sua voluit per fabulosa tractari. (1.2.20)137 [But because they realize that a frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who, just as she has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments, has also desired to have her secrets handled by more prudent individuals through fabulous narratives.]138

For Bernard Silvester, ‘an integument is a kind of demonstration that wraps the understanding of truth in a fabled narrative –​that is why it is also called “a wrapping” ’.139 Guillaume de Conches, however, conceives of the integument as primarily a covering, but also that which is covered by it.140 To say that a text is an integument –​i.e. a protective veil or metonymic container of truths –​ is ‘to suggest that its “literal” level is never “proper” speech, but rather is in itself already figurative’.141 If allegoresis is the unveiling of the veil that is allegory, then the veil does not exist until the act of unveiling; put differently, the necessity of unveiling is always already implied in the existence of the veil. In the dialectics between veiling and unveiling, through which allegoresis substitutes itself for allegory, meaning is necessarily a belated phenomenon: To read the text as integumentum imposes a new temporal and causal order between reader and text. The act of reading is figured as that of unveiling the text, which suggests the necessary belatedness of interpretation; but the ‘veil’ itself is necessarily a belated addition to the text, so that the cause or prior meaning revealed beneath it is in fact the belated result of the veil. Thus the ‘veil’ supplied after the text becomes the prior cause of any meanings that it delivers up.142

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In Christian exegesis, the duality between text and meaning, obscurity and clarity, is figured in the terms velatio (things hidden) and revelatio (things revealed), rather than in the figure of the integument. But despite their differences in usage and significance, the integument and the velatio, in their respective grounding in the figure of the veil, remain fundamentally related phenomena. The whitlether suit of Christ –​a suit that is never strictly or exclusively white –​is an integument. While displaying Christ’s skin in suffering, the actor veils his own body. A strange inversion takes place: through the veiling of the actor’s body, the skin that signifies Christ’s body is ‘unveiled’ to the collective gaze of the spectators. It is allegoresis in performance; not only is meaning a backward formation in time –​in the visual reading of the Christ body-​suit after it has been placed on the actor’s body –​but it is also what Beckwith calls ‘a traverse between inside and outside’.143 What is revealed is not so much the skin of the actor as the Skin Ego of Christ in suffering, or the Skin Ego of humanity in the guise of a Christ costume. For the Christ-​actor, what does it mean to wear a white skin that symbolises divine suffering? If the leather costume were a materialisation of the Skin Ego, human and/​or divine, does the actor assume the role he plays? Does he inhabit the skin-​suit as a dwelling, like the poetic subject in the lyric ‘I would be Clad in Christis Skin’? Or does he hold Christ as much as he is being held by Christ? The interface and traffic are further complicated by the fact that the Christ costume is not always made of fabric but of skin. As the actor superimposes Christ’s body of suffering (corps de souffrance) on his body in abeyance (corps en souffrance), a doubling of skin occurs. The skin of whitlether transforms the actor’s body into a living palimpsest during performance, mirroring the two layers of Anzieu’s Skin Ego: ‘one a shield against stimuli, the other a surface for registering impressions’.144 The stigmatic, Steven Connor contends, ‘read[s]‌the Crucifixion as a flattening out; the crucified body becomes a single sheet of flesh, reduced to its recto and its verso’.145 The white leather skin-​suit of Christ flattens the actor’s body, turning it into a symbolic charter of Christ. Recall that for Guillaume de Conches, the integument refers both to a figurative covering and what is covered by it. In effect, Guillaume reconceives of the thing behind the veil as a second, inner veil,

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another integument. As allegory does not exist without allegoresis, so is there never a body –​even if flayed –​without a skin of some sort. In Passus XX of Piers Plowman, something else has been doubled in the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell episodes. If one takes seriously the theatrical allusions that Langland is making in Passus XX, not only is the Christ figure an ‘actor’ in whitlether, but the suffering Christ himself is in someone else’s skin: ‘That this Iesus of his gentrice shal iouste in Pers armes, /​In his helm and in his haberion, humana natura. /​That Crist be nat yknowe for consummatus Deus, /​In Pers plates the Plouhman this prikiare shal ryde’ [That this Jesus in accordance with his noble birth shall joust in Piers’s armor, /​In his helmet and his coat of mail, human nature. /​That Christ be not known for the supreme God, /​In Piers the Ploughman’s plate-​armour this cavalier shall ride] (20.21–​4). Piers’s armour is the incarnate flesh of Christ. If Piers’s armour is a sign of the flesh, then Langland’s Christ, like the medieval actors playing him, also wears a second ‘skin’ over his divine body. This second skin of Christ signifies simultaneously his incarnation and crucifixion. The whitlether suit in the Passion drama is part of the theatrical technology of suffering. Christ’s body is literally a prosthetic body-​suit –​a pure sign of pain –​that must bleed red. Like the bleeding Lamb in Pearl, the white leather skin of Christ is marked by its woundedness. William Tydeman has shown that one of the practical purposes of the Christ body-​suit was to protect the actor from possible injuries.146 A small sac of blood or red liquid would be hidden inside the leather costume into which Longinus would pierce, simulating the effect of blood running down the spear and healing Longinus’s blindness.147 The prosthetic is no less real than the real thing. For the leather-​clad actor playing Christ, there is no distance between his skin and the whitlether. The skin of Christ in fact adheres to that of the actor. Speaking of the touch of his shirt caressing his skin, Jean-​Paul Sartre observes: ‘My shirt rubs against my skin, and I feel it. What is ordinarily for me an object most remote becomes the immediately sensible … all are present to me in a certain way, as posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh by means of their flesh’.148 The ‘flesh’ of the object that Sartre speaks of is an object already transformed by desire. In the

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proximity between his skin and the skin of an inanimate object, Sartre’s own fleshiness is present to himself. But Sartre does not confuse the existential boundaries between him and his shirt: a shirt remains a shirt. Likewise, the whitlether suit might have enhanced the visual status of the actor’s body as body during performance. Yet like Sartre’s shirt, the skin of Christ is not the skin of the actor. The whitlether suit is a commodity fetish bought with money and inscribed as property among the inventories of medieval craft guilds. As such, the whitlether suit is not unlike the ‘carapace’ that Derrida uses to refer to the armour of Hamlet’s dead father which, for Derrida, stands for the modern commodity fetish as ‘a technical prosthesis’ and ‘the body of a real artifact’.149 Covering up the spectral body of Hamlet’s dead father, the armour ‘prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly in its carapace’.150 Derrida’s notion of the commodity fetish’s carapace that enwraps tightly conjures up the ancient and medieval integument that also conceals an alleged truth beneath its wrapping. At the end of his performance, the actor who played Christ in the Passion drama must undress and take off his costume, inflicting a symbolic (self-​)flaying upon himself. The empty integumenta of the white leather skin lies uninhabited, waiting for the next meeting of the body in abeyance with the body in suffering.

The precaritised Jew The whitlether suit, as well as the Charter of Christ tradition, embodies Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein’s theoretical concept of ‘tranimality’. Whereas animalities, in Hayward and Weinstein’s formulation, are ‘sensuous materialities, composite of affects and percepts’, tranimalities are ‘a double orientation’ that ‘entangle and enmesh trans* and animals in a generative (if also corrosive) tension’.151 The handling of processed leather skin or parchment through performance and inscription turns animal skins into vehicles for human and divine signification. A traverse of inside and outside, the leather skin is an intra-​and inter-​species integument that both displays and invites inscription and interpretation, allegory and allegoresis; it is, in other words, speciation and specification. Crucially, the whitlether suit is an affective, material

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and social interface that exemplifies the workings of ‘trans*ing’, as the asterisk marks the prepositional, prehensile and agglutinating nature of whiteness and its attachment to the suffixial, material object of leather: ‘whit*lether’. The body of the actor in a whitlether suit playing Christ is a cultural body, a Christian body, a performing body and a labouring body. As a body signifying the human vulnerability of Christ in the Passion, between death and resurrection, the body wrapped in whitlether is a precarious body. Within the assemblage of whit*lether, the asterisk marks the precarious linkage between whiteness and the leather skin-​suit. The Christ-​Book tradition –​ inclusive of texts such as the Charter of Christ and Piers Plowman –​is very much concerned with issues of precarity: crises of faith, labour, embodiment, identity and community. Christianity, anchored by the theology of divine sacrifice, is a religion of pain and suffering. I would further suggest that Christianity is also premised on a theology of precariousness, one that depends on the simultaneous and often contradictory differentiation and normalisation of precarity. One strand of precarity studies, dominant in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, is rooted in the Marxist critique of capitalism.152 But in addition to, or because of, economic plights, precarity is necessarily implicative of the psychic, affective and aesthetic dimensions of the human condition. As Isabell Lorey notes, ‘precarity in capitalism is nothing new’.153 What precarity studies offers is a new theoretical language to examine medieval theology. I would argue that within the premodern context, issues of economic precarity are inextricable from matters of faith and religious difference, especially those between Christianity and Judaism. Theorists of precarity have distinguished among the concepts and deployments of terms like ‘precarity’, ‘precariousness’ and ‘precaritisation’ (sometimes ‘precarisation’). Precariousness, for Judith Butler, is a shared existential condition; it is not individual; and it marks the fundamental interdependence of human sociality. As Butler suggests, precariousness is ‘a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form’.154 But if precariousness is universal and endemic to political life, precarity concerns the uneven differentiations of precariousness across various social groups. Precarity, as Lorey explains, denotes the effects of unequal distributions of precariousness: ‘Precarity designates

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striating and segmenting precariousness as conditions of inequality, the hierarchization of “being-​with”, which accompanies processes of Othering’.155 Whereas Butler characterises precaritisation as ‘an ongoing process’, Lorey suggests that precaritisation also ‘designates not only working and living conditions but also ways of subjectivation, embodiment, and therefore agency’.156 Lorey further contends that the precarious is simultaneously the condition and effect of domination and security, what she terms ‘governmental precarization’.157 In other words, precaritisation is no longer the exception but has become normalised under neoliberalism and enables governance through insecurity. Precaritisation is one of the Foucauldian security technologies of late modernity. Though Lorey is examining specifically the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, her argument can be extended back to the premodern period. Precarity has always been unevenly distributed, represented and analysed, then and now. In the late medieval tradition of the whitlether, who exactly are the precarious that the suit indexes? As Jasbir Puar notes, precarity is ‘linked to who is effected how and where’.158 Ostensibly, the Christ-​actor performs the precarity of the Passion. But the mostly amateurish artisans and labourers who participated in late medieval passion dramas and Corpus Christi ceremonials, though they might be of middle to lower socio-​ economic classes, were not always the truly precarious ones within the broader cultural, historical contexts. The performance of suffering is not necessarily an instance of suffering; the performance of precarity does not index directly or correctly precarity within and without the performance context. The truly precarious, I contend, are not the medieval Christians but the Jews, both as a real historical presence and as an imagined trope in Western Christendom. Christianity’s sense of precariousness depends on Jewish precarity or, more precisely, on Jewish precaritisation. Building on Foucauldian biopolitics, Lorey argues that precaritisation as a mode of governance operates through the striation of the Other as a threat against which the community must protect itself: ‘Legitimizing the protection of some generally requires striating the precarity of those marked as “other” … who are accordingly positioned within and outside of the political and social community as “a-​normal” and “alien” ’.159

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Medieval Christians, driven by a distorted sense of self-​victimhood, associated the Jews with money-​lending and usury, misconstrued them as the source of their economic difficulties and precaritised the Jews as Europe’s internal Other. Within the Christ-​Book and the whitlether suit traditions, the precaritisation of Jews manifests as a deformational force: the stretch. Always present at the edge of the Charter of Christ or the surface of the whitlether suit, the Jews are imagined as pulling at, stretching and bobbing the Christian body politic. In the N-​Town Crucifixion play, the incompetent Jews who nail Jesus to the Cross make the holes too far apart and must therefore stretch his body beyond human endurance: Secudus Judeus: Fest on a rop and pulle hym long, And I xal drawe þe ageyn. Spare we not þese ropys strong, Þow we brest both flesch and veyn. Tercius Judeus: Dryve in þe nayl anon, lete se, And loke and þe flesch and senues well last.160

Precaritisation as a technique of governance normalises anti-​Semitism by imagining a role reversal: the victim is figured as the victimiser; the stretched becomes the stretcher. What the Charter of Christ and the whitlether suit display and celebrate is a shared sense of precariousness, one that is differentiated, masked and deflected. White Christian precarity is indistinguishable from white governmentality. The performance of passion dramas thereby facilitates the sharing of a distorted view of Jews as a common threat; in turn, the sharing of the Jewish threat becomes a collective stretching of the Jewish body. Precarity politics, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter suggest, is double-​edged and risky. On the one hand, precarity provides a common platform for struggle. On the other hand, precarity ‘risks dovetailing with the dominant rhetoric of security that emanates from the established political classes’.161 That is, precarity politics is readily adaptable as a mode of governance that reinscribes the uneven and even false precaritisation of some and not others. By gesturing to the Jews as Jesus killers, the whitlether suit and the Charter of Christ make possible the doubleness and dovetailing of precarity with dominant Christian governmentality. Vicarious

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suffering in theatrical performance is precarious because it is easily manipulated. Who is stretching whom? The irony of the whitlether suit, as well as of the Christ-​Book tradition, is that the skin signifying Christian salvation is ultimately a Jewish one. Despite Christian efforts at de-​Judaicising, suppressing, typologising, splicing and transmutating the Jewish body and its past, Jesus remains a Jew. To put on the whitlether skin of Christ is to wear what I would call the ‘Jewskin’. The Jewskin is not papery, spectral or virtual; it is trans*ed, stretched and precaritised.162 The second irony is the fact that in medieval Jewish parchment culture, religious regulations for the production of writable skins for ritual use delegated the handling of animal skins to non-​Jews whenever possible: ‘After [the skins] were taken out of the second lime solution, if a non-​Jew is the one who does the work, should from now on assist a Jew stretching the skin that will be qelaf … And when the skin is stretched … let the Non-​Jew do everything necessary’.163 Within the premodern Christian imaginary, however, the precaritised Jew is a stretched Jew. In Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, for example, the Jews who murdered the young Christian clergeon are punished first by being drawn (stretched) and then hanged. The medieval practice of the ‘Jewish Execution’ stipulated the hanging of the Jewish criminal upside down with dogs right beneath. By the time of the ritual murder trial in Trent in 1475, the torture mechanism strappada would hoist the victim, hands tied behind with a long rope, up in the air by a pulley.164 While the Middle English ‘strecchen’ did not have the sense of penal hanging, by the early modern period, it certainly did acquire that meaning.165 The historical trajectory from the drawing, hanging, to the hoisting of the guilty Jew, I suspect, tracks the persistent stretching of the Jewish body from the medieval Christian imaginary to the early modern disciplinary machine. The asterisk in trans*ing, as Hayward and Weinstein theorise, charts ‘a radiated reach’.166 As it radiates, the asterisk ‘stretches’, marking ‘an intensification and [a]‌placeholder’.167 In medieval colour theory, colours ‘stretch’ from either whiteness or blackness. In John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Robert Grosseteste’s De colore, which was incorporated by Bartholomaeus Anglicus into his De proprietatibus rerum, he notes that ‘so of white comeþ seuene colours and streccheþ fro þe white toward blak’.168 Trevisa’s

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choice of the Middle English word strecchen is meant to capture the scalar quality missing in the more vector-​like Latin terms ascenditur and descenditur in Grosseteste’s text. The Middle English strecchen in this instance denotes the arraying of colours in order, as colours ‘radiate’ from blackness or whiteness.169 Or, colours result from the stretching forth of whiteness or blackness. This pseudo-​ scientific sense of strecchen might appear radically different from those of the stretching of the Christ Charter, the leather skin-​suit or the disciplined body of the Jew. Yet each marks a radiation, a movement, a trans*ing, of whiteness towards difference, be it colour, salvation or precarity. The stretch is the asterisk at the interface between the whitlether suit and the Christ-​actor, marking the splice of whit*lether. The asterisk within the medieval whitlether suit –​the stretch of whiteness linking the animal, the human and the divine –​signifies Jewishness, for the leather skin indexes the Jewishness of Christ and of the Jews at large. To stretch the white skin-​qua-​whiteness is to stretch the Jewskin. The Jewish body is a precaritised body because, then as now, the relationship between European Jews and whiteness remains tenuous and precarious. As Hennessy observes, Longinus’s spear is frequently figured as a stylus in medieval devotional literature.170 The instrumentality of Longinus to Christian salvation is inseparable from his (Jewish) precarity, however, because he embodies the risky double-​edge of precarity politics. Premodern white precarity politics is rooted in anti-​ Semitism. Longinus’s spear-​stylus makes possible the performance of Christ’s precarity, but his blindness and Jewishness mark the precaritisation of Jews as a normalised mode of Christian governance. The transverse of the whitlether suit is the veil of spiritual blindness, each stretching towards the other.

Notes 1 Didier Anzieu, L’Epiderme nomade et la peau psychique (Paris: Apsygée, 1990), p. 26. The translation is by Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 7. 2 Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 18.

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3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), sec. I.19. 4 Edward Wheatley, ‘ “Blind” Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe’, Exemplaria, 14:2 (2002), 353. 5 See Ruth Mellinkoff, ‘Demonic Winged Headgear’, Viator, 16 (1985), 367–​405; and Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 69. 6 Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 95–​6. 7 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jews and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943), p. 22. 8 Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 94. 9 Quoted in Kruger, The Spectral Jew, pp. 94–​5. 10 Quoted in Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-​ Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 188. 11 Acts 9:18. 12 Quoted in Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 117. 13 Ibid., p. 117. 14 Quoted in Wheatley, ‘Blind Jews’, 359. 15 Ibid., 359. 16 Camille, Gothic Idol, p. 178. 17 Mellinkoff, Outcasts, p. 65. 18 William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C-​Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), p. 323 n.82. 19 In Edward Grant (ed.), A Source Book on Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 399. 20 David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 341. See also Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 21 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 57. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-​Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1.

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23 Ibid., p. 133. 24 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 27. 25 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 99. 26 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 179. 27 Wheatley, ‘Blind Jews’, 353. See also Claire Sponsler, ‘Violated Bodies: The Spectacle of Suffering in Corpus Christi Pageants’, in Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 136–​60. 28 Quoted in Wheatley, ‘Blind Jews’, 362. 29 Hadassah Posey Goodman, Original Elements in the French and German Passion Plays (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1954), p. 102. 30 Wheatley, ‘Blind Jews’, 273. 31 For the 1217 decree by Henry III, see Guido Kisch, ‘The Yellow Badge in History’, Historia Judaica, 4:2 (1942), 105; and Camille, Gothic Idol, p. 181. 32 Edward Wheatley, ‘Blind Jews’, 381. 33 Modern English translations are mine. 34 Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (Detroit, MI: Singing Tree Press, 1968), p. 308. 35 Paul B. Newman, Growing Up in the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), p. 91. See also Edward Wheatley, ‘The Blind Beating the Blind: An Unidentified “Game” in a Marginal Illustration of The Romance of Alexander, MS Bodley 264’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 68 (2005), 213–​17. 36 Quoted in Gerald Robert Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 508. 37 Ibid., p. 510. 38 York play Peter Denies Jesus: Jesus Examined by Caiaphas, 354–​5, my emphasis; in Richard Beadle (ed.), The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982). 39 Clifford Davidson (ed.), A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), p. 97, my emphasis. 40 Ibid., pp. 99–​100. 41 See Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) for terminology. 42 As Pearsall explains, the feast of Corpus Christi, which celebrated the body of Christ in the Eucharist, was first confirmed in England in 1311. See Langland, Piers Plowman, p. 283 n.120. In addition to the Corpus Christi procession, many late medieval cities in

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England also staged cycles of mystery drama dealing with salvation history, especially the life and the Passion of Christ. See also Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Rubin notes that the earliest reference to a play on Corpus Christi was made by Robert Holcot around 1335, and that the first possible mention of the York cycle was in 1376, followed by entries in the guild ordinances in the 1370s and 1380s (pp. 273–​4). David M. Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), gives a slightly different year for the first recorded performance of the York cycle, in 1378, speculating that the cycles did not take hold until the Corpus Christi procession had been ‘growing for some decades’ (p. 235). 43 Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (eds), York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 237. 44 Stephen A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, vol. 5 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 63. 45 Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 594. 46 Barney, Penn Commentary, p. 63. 47 See Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 201–​16. 48 Meg Twycross, ‘ “With what body shall they come?”: Black and White Souls in the English Mystery Plays’, in Helen Phillips (ed.), Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), p. 279. 49 Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 316. For ancient and medieval theories of masking, see pp. 280–​310. 50 Claire Sponsler, ‘Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-​ Class Festivities’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 335. 51 Rice and Pappano, Civic Cycles, pp. 6, 15. 52 According to Bevington, Medieval Drama, some actors in the Corpus Christi plays were professionals who were paid well (p. 239). Twycross, however, points out that most of the actors were amateurs belonging to semi-​professional dramatic societies. See Meg Twycross, ‘The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays’, in Richard Beadle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 44. 53 See John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–​ 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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54 Rice and Pappano, Civic Cycles, p. 26. 55 Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, pp. 46–​7. 56 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 187. 57 Peter W. Travis, ‘The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England’, in Albert H. Tricomi (ed.), Early Drama to 1600, vol. 13 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), p. 23. 58 Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 170. 59 Alienated from both Christians and Jews, Jewish converts were sometimes confined to the support of a medieval converts’ home (domus conversorum), specifically in thirteenth-​century England. See Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 166. 60 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 61. 61 Ibid., p. 61. 62 Beadle, York Plays: The Harrowing of Hell, lines 89–​90. 63 Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley (eds), The Towneley Plays, EETS, s.s. 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 81–​2. 64 Carleton Brown (ed.), Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 65 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, rev. edn, 1996), p. 136. 66 Quoted in William Tydeman (ed.), The Medieval European Stage, 500–​1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 47. 67 William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Conditions, c.800–​ 1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 213. 68 Ibid., p. 213. 69 Clifford Davidson, ‘Nudity, the Body, and Early English Drama’, in History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 152. 70 I would like to thank Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter for their generosity in answering my questions through email correspondence. 71 MED, s.v. ‘whit’, 2(a). 72 OED, s.v. ‘whitleather’, 1(a). 73 MED, s.v. ‘tauen’, 1(a). 74 Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–​1365 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1980), p. 78. 75 Quoted in Tydeman, Theatre in the Middle Ages, p. 212. 76 Quoted in Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 227. 77 Ibid., p. 227.

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78 Ibid., p. 227. 79 Quoted in Davidson, ‘Nudity’, p. 170. 80 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Town and Country in Late Medieval England: the Hide and Leather Trade’, in Penelope J. Corfield and Derek Keene (eds), Work in Towns 850–​1850 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 57. See also Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 81 Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 22. 82 Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 53. Kowaleski, ‘Town and Country’, p. 57. 83 Kowaleski, ‘Town and Country’, pp. 64–​5. 84 For tanning and tawing, see Swanson, Medieval Artisans, pp. 54–​9. 85 See Rice and Pappano, Civic Cycles, the Introduction and Chapter 1. 86 R. Reed, Ancient Skins, Parchments and Leathers (London: Seminar Press, 1972), p. 62. For an example of the ordinances of the white-​tawyers from the mid-​fourteenth century, see Edward Potts Cheyney, English Towns and Gilds (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1898), pp. 23–​5. 87 Kowaleski, ‘Town and Country’, pp. 66–​7. 88 Twycross ‘Black and White Souls’, pp. 272–​3. 89 Alfred J. López, ‘The Gaze of the White Wolf: Psychoanalysis, Whiteness, and Colonial Trauma’, in Alfred J. López (ed.), Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 156, original emphasis. 90 Mary Clemente Davlin, The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 67. 91 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions: Books I–XIII, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), sec. 7.19.14; and Bruce Holsinger, On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023). 92 Quoted in Davlin, The Place of God, p. 67. 93 Hennessy’s transcription and translation, in Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, ‘The Social Life of a Manuscript Metaphor: Christ’s Blood as Ink’, in Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse and Kathryn A. Smith (eds), The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 23. 94 Ibid., p. 23

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95 Quoted in James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979), p. 305 n.511. 96 Ibid., p. 123, my emphasis. 97 Ibid., p. 125 (Latin and translation), original emphasis. 98 H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 140. 99 The English translation is by Sarah Kay, in ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36:1 (2006), 43. 100 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Lukynge in haly bukes: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’, Analecta Cartusiana, 106 (1984), 10 n.34; and Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen series, 36 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 311. 101 Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 259. 102 Hennessy, ‘Christ’s Blood as Ink’, p. 18. 103 Carl Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and His Followers (London: Sonnenschein, 1895–​96), p. 206. 104 Charlotte D’Evelyn, Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ: From British Museum Addit. MS. 11307, EETS, no. 158 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 40. 105 S. J. Ogilvie-​Thomson (ed.), Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, EETS, no. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 78, my emphasis. 106 Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. 263. 107 Ibid., pp. 249–​50. 108 Quoted in Rubin, Christ’s Body, p. 305. 109 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 40 (New York: McGraw-​ Hill, 1964). Aquinas forbids the wearing of amulets in most instances, citing the fear that inscriptions might imply an ‘invocation of the demonic’ (2a2æ.96.4). 110 Green, A Crisis of Truth, p. 276. 111 Mary Caroline Spalding, The Middle English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1914), pp. 22–​4. 112 Ibid., p. 26, my emphasis. 113 MED, s.v. ‘tauen’, 1(a). 114 See Hennessy, ‘Christ’s Blood as Ink’, p. 33.

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115 Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 116 Pearsall, Piers Plowman, p. 306 n.7. 117 Barney, Penn Commentary, p. 49. 118 Steiner, Documentary Culture, p. 93. 119 Emily Steiner, ‘Langland’s Documents’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 95–115. 120 Malcolm Godden, The Making of Piers Plowman (London: Longman, 1990), p. 139, my emphasis. 121 Brown (ed.), Religious Lyrics, p. 88. My translation. 122 Clifford Davidson, ‘Suffering and the York Plays’, Philological Quarterly, 81:1 (2002), 10, my emphasis. 123 Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, ‘Aspects of Blood Piety in Late Medieval English Manuscript: London, British Library Additional 37049’, in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 187. 124 Hennessy, ‘Christ’s Blood as Ink’, p. 26. 125 Jay Prosser, ‘Skin Memories’, in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 52. 126 Ibid., p. 54. 127 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed. and trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1923–​25), p. 26. 128 Didier Anzieu, A Skin for Thought: Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab on Psychology and Psychoanalysis, trans. Daphne Nash Briggs (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 63. 129 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Naomi Segal (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 226. 130 Ibid., p. 231 n.3. 131 Ibid., p. 231. 132 Ibid., p. 231. 133 Ibid., p. 232. 134 Ibid., p. 227. 135 Ibid., p. 229. 136 Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, ‘Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics’, Exemplaria, 3:1 (1991), 159–​87. 137 Macrobius, Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1963), sec. 1.2.20. 138 William Harris Stahl (trans.), Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 87.

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139 Quoted in Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 25. 140 Ibid., p. 25. For other studies of the integument in medieval philosophy and rhetoric, see Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 141 Copeland and Melville, ‘Allegory and Allegoresis’, 170. 142 Ibid., 171. 143 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 58. 144 Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 11. 145 Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 136. 146 Tydeman, Theatre in the Middle Ages, p. 76. 147 Davidson, ‘Nudity’, p. 159. 148 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 1956), p. 509. 149 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7. 150 Ibid., p. 8, my emphasis. 151 Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, ‘Tranimalities in the Age of Trans* Life’, TSQ, 2:2 (2015), 200–​1. 152 See for instance, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks’, Variant, 25 (2006), 10–​13. 153 In Jasbir Puar (ed.), ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56:4 (2012), 165. 154 Ibid., 169. 155 Isabell Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal: EIPCP Multilingual Webjournal (January 2011). http://​ eipcp.net/​tran​sver​sal/​0811/​lorey/​en, original emphasis. (Accessed on 5 May 2020). 156 Butler in Puar (ed.), ‘Precarity Talk’, 169 (Butler), and 164 (Lorey). 157 Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, n.p. 158 In Puar (ed.), ‘Precarity Talk’, 170, original emphasis. 159 Lorey, ‘Governmental Precarization’, n.p. 160 Stephen Spector (ed.), The N-​Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8, EETS 2.2, nos 11 and 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, vol. 1, II. 218–​21). See Merrall Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-​membering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-​Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama, 41:4 (2007–​8), 439–​63.

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61 Neilson and Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness’, p. 11. 1 162 See Kathleen Biddick, ‘Paper Jews: Inscription/​Ethnicity/​Ethnography’, Art Bulletin, 78:4 (1996), 594–​8; and Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 243–​60; and Kruger, The Spectral Jew. 163 Quoted in Annett Martini, ‘Ritual Consecration in the Context of Writing the Holy Scrolls: Jews in Medieval Europe between Demarcation and Acculturation’, European Journal of Jewish Studies, 11 (2017), 189–​90. 164 See Rudolf Glanz, ‘The “Jewish Execution” in Medieval Germany’, Jewish Social Studies, 5:1 (1943), 3–​ 26; and R. Po-​ Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 165 OED, s.v. ‘stretch’ 18. 166 Hayward and Weinstein, ‘Tranimalities’, 198. 167 Ibid., 198. 168 Seymour, M. C. (ed.), On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of “Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum.” A Critical Text, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975–​ 78), book 19, ­chapter 8, lines 13–​20 (vol. 2, p. 1277). 169 MED, s.v. ‘strecchen’, 4(a). 170 See Hennessy, ‘Christ’s Blood as Ink’, p. 33. Regarding Longinus’s spear, Hennessy translates British Library, MS Addit. 37049, fol. 23r, as follows: ‘With percyhng sore of my here, /​With a spere þat was scharpe’.

4 Flat white

Cute makes you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. –​Frances Richard1

What does precarity do to whiteness as an aesthetic category, as an affect and as an object? The late medieval whitlether suit signifies the multitude of irreducible singularities that exist in precarity. Under duress, whiteness as the skin of the multitude stretches to the limit. In this chapter, I explore a different but related way of putting pressure on whiteness: the squeeze. Both stretching and squeezing are what Michel Serres identifies as actions of homeomorphic deformation that exert force on the spatial properties of an object.2 I take as my test case Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales, arguing that socio-​cultural forms of violent deformations of the white object are wilful responses to racial and religious difference. Thopas, the titular character of the tale, possesses a bread-​like white face: ‘Whit was his face as payndemayn’ [White was his face as fine white bread] (VII.725).3 Cute, cuddly and enticingly edible, Thopas is not dissimilar to the persona of Geoffrey the narrator, who is like ‘a popet in an arm t’enbrace’ (VII.701). Cuteness may seem tangential to whiteness, appearing ever so briefly as dainty dollification or as white enfacement. But tangentiality is precisely the point, for it signals one of the more subtle and sophisticated aesthetic tactics whiteness deploys. Thopas’s white face operates as a pressure point of deformation that lies in tangent to whiteness. Cuteness is an operation of whiteness that sublimates violence into a consumable commodity that look innocuous, sweet, innocent and therefore manageable. Comfort-​oriented cuteness is a technique of white capitalism, and haptic contiguity marks the aesthetic violence

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of culturalisation. Specifically, cutification is a response to the racialised precarity posed by the religious and racial Other, especially by the Jews in the Prioress’s Tale that immediately precedes Sir Thopas. Anti-​Semitic violence transforms into the violence of aesthetic deformation: the white face is squeezed and flattened to the breaking point. But as much as the narrative itself is pressurised, Sir Thopas makes affective and aesthetic demands on its audience, thereby ‘squeezing’ the audience as they squirm in shameful discomfort. The tale in effect cutifies its readers, turning them into cuddly popets with a doughy white face. The becoming white* of the romance commodity is the violent conversion of white cuteness into white shame. Evaluations of Sir Thopas are inseparable from perceptions of Chaucer’s authorial persona in the Canterbury Tales. The Host, singling Geoffrey out, describes him as ‘a popet in an arm t’enbrace /​ For any womman, smal and fair of face’ (VII.701–​2). On the basis of Geoffrey’s appearance, he assumes the forthcoming tale would be ‘Som deyntee thyng’ (VII.711). Sir Thopas, mirroring its teller, is petite, charming and cute. In fact, cuteness runs down, or ‘squeezes’ through, Geoffrey the narrator, Thopas and the tale itself. To read the tale is to cringe from and confront cute shame. While the tale aligns itself with the tradition of popular Middle English romances, it has been variously read as a satire, parody, burlesque, minstrel performance, joke, nursery rhyme and childish fantasy.4 Running through much of modern criticism is a propensity for conflating generic designation with aesthetic judgement, which has the effect of rendering the poem frivolous, derivative and cheap. In other words, too cute. At the heart of the tale’s reception is a deep ambivalence towards the text’s worth and status. On the one hand, Sir Thopas is a pile of turd that fails to deliver its promised daintiness. On the other hand, it is a tour de force that demonstrates Chaucer’s mastery of a popular genre. The critical double-​move is necessary to reclaiming, if not redeeming, Sir Thopas and converting cute shame into sombre authority. But surely the dainty and the endearing could generate substantive pleasure, sustain critical rigour and stand on their own without shame. Reading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from a preoccupation with genre to questions of affective and aesthetic values, of Chaucer’s figurations

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of corpus and desire, of textual production and reception and of violence and survival. I begin with a discussion of infantilisation and feminisation as the primary techniques of cutification in Sir Thopas. Recognisable cute features trigger both tender caretaking and sadistic aggression in the subject; the cute object is simultaneously held gently and squeezed tightly. Chaucer the pilgrim, Thopas and the tale undergo deformations of their respective bodies under the duress of the cute response. The flattening of physical and textual bodies results in the obliteration of verticality and depth. Adapting the superflat movement in Japanese contemporary art as an explanatory framework, I argue that cuteness brings about a compression of narrative layers and signifying networks. Desire, like the horizontal, non-​linear organisation of the poem’s layout in many medieval manuscripts, moves sideways. The lateral, agglutinating mobility of Thopas further allows him to cutify things and signs in his vicinity; the tale’s catalogues of romance motifs function as cute object clusters within a household of the rising merchant-​knight classes in late medieval English society.5 As a response to the anti-​ Semitic violence in the Prioress’s Tale, Sir Thopas sublimates racial and religious violence via cutification, a form of culturalisation that flattens whiteness into consumable goods. White shame becomes indistinguishable from cute shame. Too much sticky cuteness, however, leads to revulsion. When the Host interrupts Chaucer and compares the tale to excrement, he enacts the labile fungibility of adoration and disgust. At the same time, he secures the precarious survival of Sir Thopas after the traumatic ‘squeeze’ of cuteness.

Squeezed vulnerability In the presence of a teddy bear, the beholder responds with an instinctual ‘Aww’ that recognises the object’s cuteness and registers its effects. Style may be attributed to qualities of appearance and form, but aesthetic judgement is deeply rooted in affect. What Joshua Paul Dale terms the ‘Aww factor’ is, in Sianne Ngai’s formulation, ‘a feeling-​based evaluation or speech act, a particular way of communicating a complex mixture of feelings about an object

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to others and demanding that they feel the same’.6 The ‘Aww’ utterance always presumes an audience that serves as witness to the power of the cute object and the subject’s quasi-​religious rapture. When the Host utters his characterisation of Chaucer the pilgrim as a shy and embraceable figure, he constructs a community of like-​minded readers who ostensibly share his aesthetic and affective values. A cute thing possesses physical markers that set it apart from the uncute; its taxonomy overlaps with that of a child in terms of age, features and behaviours. Behavioural biologist Konrad Lorenz identifies a set of biological and behavioural traits –​the child schema (Kindchenschema) –​that qualifies a juvenile creature as cute: a large head in relation to the body; round, protruding cheeks; a plump body; short, thick extremities; a body surface pleasurable to the touch; and behaviour indicating weakness and clumsiness.7 To these, Ngai adds other characteristics that cute objects may share: femininity; primitivism; anthropomorphism; and formal properties of compactness, softness, simplicity and pliancy.8 Together, these features act as stimuli that trigger the ‘Aww’ response. On the surface, Chaucer in the Prologue to Sir Thopas possesses the obvious markers of cuteness: small, plush, infantile and feminine. The Host describes Chaucer as round and cuddly, for his ‘waast is shape’ (VII.700) like himself, and compares him to a popet for women. His description effectively cutifies Chaucer’s body. The Middle English popet may refer to a puppet or doll; it could also denote a youth, a young girl, a babe or a small person.9 The semantic range of popet suggests that Chaucer the pilgrim does not easily escape the reaches of cuteness whichever direction one turns to locate the significance of his body. Simultaneously a living being and an inanimate object, he is compact, soft, meek and puerile. Reticent and physically at a distance from the pilgrim fellowship, Chaucer ‘unto no wight dooth he daliaunce’ (VII.704) and prefers staring at the ground as if hunting a hare. Yet paradoxically, Chaucer’s purported shyness and ‘elvyssh’ (VII.703) appearance further enhance his cute mystique. Alan T. Gaylord notes that Chaucer’s elvishness marks ‘a puckish relation to “the little people” ’, while Lee Patterson observes that elves in the medieval imagination are

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‘child-​like … but not exactly children’.10 Like a silent toy patiently waiting to be picked up and hugged, Chaucer’s cute traits advertise his presence and attract attention. The Host’s rendering of Chaucer signifies one means of handling his authorial body. Having remained aloof throughout much of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer finally re-​joins the body politic only through cuteness. ‘His cheere’, that small and fair face, leads the Host to anticipate ‘Som deyntee thyng’ (VII.711) in his imminent narrative. While deyntee means ‘excellent’ and ‘delightful’, it also denotes ‘precious’ and ‘delicately pretty’ –​in other words, cute.11 The Host thereby sets up audience expectations and critical reception by pre-​emptively extending his cutification of Chaucer’s corpus from body to text. There is, of course, no explicit ‘Aww’ utterance in the tale. Nonetheless, ‘Aww’ may manifest as a call to action, as cuteness binds with other affects such as helplessness, pitifulness and despondency. Coupled with cute features, the resulting aesthetic-​ affective assemblage is a sophisticated mechanism for eliciting tender loving care. Indeed, cuteness is an evolutionary adaptation in some animals to ensure the survival of their young, for to be cute is to be noticed and nurtured.12 The affection towards the cute thing, be it a real or stuffed (toy) puppy, identifies the caregiver as a mother. Lori Merish suggests ‘the cute demands a maternal response and interpellates its viewers/​consumers as “maternal” ’.13 Reading the portrait of Chaucer in the Prologue to Sir Thopas, David Wallace speculates that his ‘passivity is said to invite physical handling. … Such emphases upon physical vulnerability and social isolation suggest the impress of political pressures requiring a new explanatory framework’.14 Cuteness offers one explanatory framework here. Chaucer imagines his vulnerable body as a delicate object that invites handling and needs maternal protection. The mother–​child dynamic between the author and his audience reflects a market economy in which the cute thing ‘always in some sense designates a commodity in search of its mother, and is constructed to generate maternal desire; the consumer (or potential consumer is expected … to pretend she or he is the cute’s mother’.15 Through the Host’s portrayal, the Chaucerian narrator, as well as Sir Thopas, becomes a cutified orphan-​commodity. To read Sir Thopas is to hold Chaucer and his make-​believe mother.

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Caretaking as the quintessential ‘Aww’ response remains a powerful critical paradigm. Aranye Fradenburg has commented on Chaucerian narrators’ tenacious faith in the power of poetry to sustain human survival, for they are willing ‘to keep on moving on, led, for example, by garrulous eagles or puppies so charming as to have real ears and enjoy having the tops of their soft heads patted by plump little poppets’.16 Replicating Lorenz’s child schema and the caretaking thesis, Fradenburg conceives of Chaucerian cuteness as a positive, nurturing force: ‘Even cuteness is about healing. Cuteness is inclusive, “generous”; it requires gestures that invite care and protection’.17 In her formulation, the same spirit of liveliness as embodied in the cute puppy from the Book of the Duchess animates Chaucer’s authorial persona in Sir Thopas as he is handled by the Host and, by extension, the reader. Yet a tautology undergirds Fradenburg’s love of Chaucer that mirrors Roland Barthes’s insight into the solipsistic nature of adoration and love: ‘The adorable is what is adorable. Or again: I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you’.18 The reader, following the Host’s example, converts Chaucer the pilgrim into a tautological love object: Chaucer is adorable because he is adorable. Cuteness studies in the twentieth-​first century have begun to challenge Lorenz’s child schema and the caretaking paradigm. While scholars are unable to determine whether or not the cute response is the result of biology or learning, many argue that the cute object stimulates in the subject a desire for social engagement; caretaking is one of many forms possible. Gary D. Sherman and Jonathan Haidt propose that while cuteness may increase the survival of one’s offspring, its primary function is to elicit ‘a wide variety of affiliative behaviours, such as attempts to touch, hold, pet, play with, talk to, or otherwise engage the cute entity’.19 When the Host fixes his eyes on Chaucer the cuddly pilgrim, he draws him out to speak for the first time in the space of the Canterbury Tales and demands that he tell ‘a tale of myrthe’ (VII.706). The Host’s intention is not necessarily to hold and protect Chaucer but to socialise him into the pilgrim fellowship through cutification. Someone else –​‘any womman’ (VII.702), it seems –​could play the role of Chaucer’s mother.

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Himself cutified by the Host, Chaucer the pilgrim goes on to cutify the romance hero in his first tale. Sir Thopas is ‘fair and gent’ (VII.715) and has ‘sydes smale’ (VII.836). Moreover, ‘Whit was his face as payndemayn /​His lippes rede as rose; /​His rode is lyk scarlet in grayn, /​… [and] He had a semely nose’ (VII.725–​9). As conventional attributes of women and children, Thopas’s white face is a sign of feminine weak will, and his slender waist symbolises timorousness and fearfulness.20 His long saffron hair and beard may connote a wig and a fake beard, since saffron was used for dyeing the flax to make the hair of angels and children in medieval theatrical performance.21 For Gaylord, the description of Thopas is ‘too pretty’, filled with ‘lady-​words for our hero, who stands out as a blushing doll of a child’.22 If the cuteness of Chaucer tests the limit of acceptable femininity, that of Thopas definitively pushes beyond the threshold of respectability. Practically a bearded lady, Thopas, for some, is simply too cute for comfort. Part of Thopas’s cuteness derives from his childishness. Though he excels in archery and wrestling, these are youthful pursuits, inappropriate for a mature warrior. Thopas behaves like ‘a boy dressing up as a knight’.23 His androgynous appearance accentuates his immaturity, artificiality and lack of a core identity. And Thopas’s name, like his body, carries tinges of effeminacy; in romances, it sometimes appears as a woman’s name.24 Topaz is known in medieval lapidaries for its brilliance and clarity, and its beauty is associated with chastity.25 In the tale, Thopas is ‘chaast and no lechour’ (VII.745), though ‘Ful many a mayde, bright in bour, /​ They moorne for hym paramour’ (VII.742–​3). Despite his being ‘the flour /​Of roial chivalry’ (VII.901–​2), the child Thopas has difficulty coping with a hostile and violent world outside the comfort of his town and home. Confronted by the giant Olifaunt in Fairyland, he performs the romance hero’s obligatory taunting of the monster and boasting of his own prowess: ‘Thy mawe /​Shal I percen, if I may, /​Er it be fully pryme of day’ (VII.823–​5). Yet when Olifaunt casts stones at him, he ‘drow abak ful faste’ (VII.827) and ‘faire escapeth’ (VII.830). Petite and vulnerable, Thopas is in desperate need of protection. Real fighting and killing are challenges for someone else; an adorable dandy, he retreats into his cute veneer.

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Cutification via miniaturisation, once set in motion by the Host, spreads from Chaucer the pilgrim to Thopas the child knight and to Sir Thopas the text. The traditional tail-​rhyme verse of popular Middle English romance, to which Sir Thopas alludes, has a basic twelve-​ line stanza structure divided into four groups of three lines: a four-​stress couplet followed by a three-​stress tail. Chaucer truncates the tail-​rhyme form in half, with a six-​line stanza made up of two couplets and two tails. Diminution also structures the entire poem. As Sir Thopas progresses, the fits get smaller and smaller; the number of stanzas shrinks from eighteen to nine, to four-​and-​ a-​half. The tale becomes ‘cuter’. John Burrow identifies the ratio of progressive diminution (4:2:1) as diapason, the numerical expression of an ordering principle in the universe. The incompleteness of Sir Thopas is therefore deliberate, as the poem appears to ‘narrow away, section by section, towards nothingness’.26 Furthermore, the aesthetic of miniaturisation in Sir Thopas reflects the etymological history of the word cute, an aphaeresis of acute.27 Through the loss of the prefixial ‘a-​’, cute sheds the root word’s association with sharp pain and rapid crisis. The etymological manoeuvre of cute enacts the logic of cutification that ‘results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite’.28 The word loses its hard edges as it becomes smaller and cuter. But the spectre of trauma and pain haunts the cute. The perceived weakness of the cute object, while eliciting caretaking behaviour in some instances, always reveals and exaggerates the power differential between object and subject. As easily as it binds with shame and embarrassment, cuteness may invite hostility and violence. Vulnerability and passivity can provoke not only tender loving care but also rough handling. By responding, the subject initiates a volatile contest for possession and control of the cute thing. And the battle for the mastery of cuteness is primarily sadistic in nature. As in certain sexual encounters, the cute response is frequently a performance that follows a sadistic script. Daniel Harris, deconstructing the cuteness of children, argues that cuteness ‘is not something we find in our children but something we do to them’.29 The desire for cuteness is ambivalent: a soft embrace might quickly harden into a strangulating chokehold. Tenderness is mixed with aggression, empathy with aversion. To fondle is to ‘squeeze’,

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however gently or tightly. A squeeze of the cute thing restores the sharp pain of the acute to cute. The deformation of the cute body aligns it with the grotesque.30 Under duress, a squeezed object appears even more powerless, more blob-​like, and therefore cuter. Plush toys for young children, for instance, are meant to be squeezed. Malleable by design, indestructible toys are made to survive the rough handling.31 Often, no force is required on the part of the subject to produce the deformity in the object. A caricature of the human body and never its exact replica, the cute thing sometimes possesses a deliberate ‘comical deformity’.32 Hello Kitty, the cute object par excellence, has a simple, diminutive and anthropomorphised body. Yet she is noticeably deformed when compared to a real cat or human, as her body evinces no details except plain, continuous and smooth contours.33 Hello Kitty’s deformity, in fact, accentuates her vulnerability and cuteness. Likewise, the elvish Chaucer, in addition to being childlike and otherworldly, may be disfigured as well. A male elf, Beryl Rowland notes, may signify a misshapen dwarf.34 Chaucer’s elvish cuteness hence maps onto a continuum stretching from the dainty and embraceable to the grotesque and menacing. The squeeze of the ‘Aww’ response need not be physical, for the ‘pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards [a cute thing]’ can apply an equally powerful immaterial force that momentarily disfigures the object.35 When the Host compares Chaucer to ‘a popet in an arm t’enbrace’ (VII.701), he effects a verbal squeeze of Chaucer’s authorial body and establishes a tacit contract with the audience –​his fellow pilgrims and all readers –​to re-​enact the double-​articulated ‘Aww’ response to care for lovingly and to hold tightly the Chaucerian body. In Sir Thopas, the Chaucerian narrator demonstrates how this is done. Thopas is a dainty plaything of a cutified teller. But as much as Chaucer mocks the knight’s effeminacy and immaturity, he nonetheless shields the errant child from bodily harm. Physical aggression sublimates into rhetorical violence. Olifaunt threatens to slay not Thopas but his horse: ‘Anon I sle thy steede /​With mace’ (VII.812–​13). The squeeze of cuteness offers one explanatory framework for understanding the Host’s initial failure to recognise Chaucer the pilgrim and his subsequent failure to socialise him. The Host’s question,

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‘What man artow?’ (VII.695), signals Chaucer’s unrecognisability and undecidability.36 In the General Prologue and throughout the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims’ primary identity is that of their vocation, as expressed through their gendered body and sartorial display. Chaucer’s inability to communicate his identity to others is symptomatic of a breakdown of categorical thinking and social taxonomy. Patterson suggests that the Host’s alternative identification of Chaucer in terms of mannerism and body shape –​his reticence and pudginess –​is ‘a substitute for the identification in terms of vocation applied to the other pilgrims’.37 Yet the Host’s relentless focus on Chaucer’s body and comportment serves only to obfuscate, not elucidate, the meaning of his enigmatic existence. Reduced to a popet in a woman’s arm, ‘Chaucer’ –​as a body and as a sign of an auctor –​is squeezed and deformed almost beyond recognition. Chaucer’s authorial persona is not unlike Hello Kitty, whose simplicity ‘characterizes her as a cryptic symbol waiting to be interpreted and filled with meaning’.38 Cute features here operate as ‘mobile signifiers’.39 Without a mouth, Hello Kitty cannot speak; her soft and round face projects a blankness ‘couched always in kawaii [literally, “acceptable love”], always made appealing by playing upon vulnerability’.40 Hers is a mute cuteness. Cuddly and silent, Chaucer the popet too is an enigma. What kind of man is he? He is a cipher and a maker of cute poetics. Chaucer the pilgrim also shares with the adorable feline a cute-​inflected queerness. Named female but without reproductive organs, Hello Kitty is trapped in perpetual girlhood. Chaucer, as the Host observes, ‘semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce /​For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce’ (VII.703–​4). Shyness and elvishness are codes for the queer: apart, mysterious and suspect.41 Considering the affinity between queerness and cuteness, Michael D. Snediker observes that either ‘arises from and gravitates toward the same questions of investment and interstitial being’, and that they share ‘a fuzzy logic’.42 Fuzziness –​an umbrella term for the soft, the round and the low-​resolution –​marks particular bodily features and behaviours as cute; similarly, the blurring of categorical distinctions renders certain bodies and praxes as queer. For the Chaucerian narrator and Thopas, cuteness makes their masculinity fuzzy. The Host, in contrast, is the self-​appointed guardian of proper

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masculinity that is definitively un-​fuzzy. In the General Prologue, he is portrayed as a ‘large man’ (I.753), who ‘of manhod hym lakkede right naught’ (I.756). When confronted by the blankness of Chaucer’s body and comportment, the Host resorts to ‘squeezing’ –​ and thereby queering –​Chaucer even harder. Full integration into the body politic is neither desirable nor possible for Chaucer under deformation. At the edge of the fellowship, ‘Chaucer’ exists as an interstitial being between the normalising social body of pilgrims and the fuzzy queer body of a cutified auctor. There is a limit to how hard one should squeeze a cute thing. Whereas plush toys are built to resist rough handling, living creatures may not endure indefinitely without the risk of death or permanent injury. One of the first things children learn about the world is not to squeeze cute animals too hard. Our world is not ‘knee-​deep in dead babies and puppies’, Dale muses, because cuteness ‘effectively disarms the subject and imposes an imperative against harming the cute object’.43 Puppies, babies and popets endure because they are endearing. Sir Thopas, however, dares to test the limits of its squeezability. As the tale unfolds, it is being squashed with increasing pressure by Chaucer, the Host and the audience. When Thopas rides out in search of adventure in Fit 1, his horse bleeds under his relentless spurring (VII.775–​7) and desperately needs ‘som solas’ (VII.782). Without the support of emotional depth or a coherent narrative, the poem flattens under the weight of Thopas’s aimless pricking and of the ever-​proliferating catalogues of objects. Sir Thopas, like a plush toy imbued with Fradenburgian liveliness, reaches a breaking point yet nonetheless survives.

Superflat romance Chaucerian cuteness in Sir Thopas operates in ways that resonate with the aesthetic praxes of the superflat popularised by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, whose work explores the cultural significance of a postmodern construct called ‘Japan’.44 I do not wish to suggest that premodern England is the same as postmodern Japan. However, I would like to examine some striking parallels and uncanny affinities between the romance world of Sir Thopas and the post-​nuclear cultural landscape of Murakami’s vision. Broadly,

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a superflat artwork exhibits some or all of the following visual features and sensibilities: a formal quality of pictorial flatness; a stylised graphic object that is nothing but brand; a flattening of hierarchical distinctions among genres; a mixture of the high and low; a juxtaposition of incongruous objects; a horizontal organisation of compositional elements that resists the illusion of depth; an ocular kinetics that decentres the visual object and the gaze; an investment in surface that erases background and foreground; a desire to realise the erotic and violent potential of cuteness; and an obsession with post-​traumatic decline and spectrality.45 The visual flatness that defines the look of the superflat is a deliberate rejection of linear perspective, its illusion of depth and its imposition of a singular, Cartesian spatial order on a two-​ dimensional pictorial frame. Interpreting Murakami’s superflat aesthetic, Hiroki Azuma argues that linear perspective is part and parcel of western modernity, whose social disciplinary regime controls the directionality of the gaze and thereby individual subjectivity. As the subject beholds a perspectival picture, the artwork returns the gaze –​‘I look at you; you look at me’ –​and creates a shared, contractual social space.46 The superflat, in contrast, is the psychic and cultural modality of postmodernity. In place of linear perspective, a flattened visual field obliterates any locatable centre; horizontality, not vertical hierarchy, structures the surface. Compositional elements’ independence is restored, and objects are no longer perceived as a unified whole. A perspectival picture controls ‘the speed of its observer’s gaze, the course of that gaze’s scan, and the subsequent  … information flow’.47 In the absence of a discernible centre, a superflat image offers no clear guidance on how an observer should move their gaze, at what speed, and how to interpret visual information. The gaze becomes mobile along horizontal planes in a superflat space. There is no correct point of view, for it makes no difference whatsoever if one views the image from an angle, focuses on one section at a time or turns the image around. As space becomes resolutely planar, the observer scans across it, gathers fragments of information and assembles images in the mind.48 The superflat is not so much about physical flatness as a ‘worldview lacking [the] gaze’.49

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Murakami’s 727 exemplifies many principles of the superflat. Composed of three panels, 727 offers no discernible vanishing point or illusion of depth. A wave-​like white ribbon cuts across the image, evoking traditional Japanese seascape imagery. The middle panel is dominated by the disfigured head of Mr DOB, one of Murakami’s most endearing creations, who flashes his sharp teeth in a perverse grin. Yet Mr DOB is not necessarily the visual centre, as the pictorial space is largely devoted to a ‘background’ that shimmers in myriad hues. The wave, the iridescent background and Mr DOB all occupy the same plane; it is impossible to ascertain definitively which stands before or behind what. In the absence of a true centre, there are multiple foci for the observer’s gaze to anchor itself. Colour provides one possible means of orientation.50 The viewer has complete freedom in choosing the course and speed of their scan, as well as in the gathering and interpreting of image fragments. Most crucially, Mr DOB’s proliferating eyes do not stand for real eyes

Figure 4.1  Takashi Murakami, 727, 1996. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board. Three panels; 3,000 × 4,500 mm (© 1996 Takashi Murakami/​ Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/​New York/​Tokyo. Permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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but are ‘eerie signs for “eye” ’.51 The observer may recognise these markings as eyes, but they are deformed mutations of the real that do not return the gaze. Without an exchange of gazes, no shared space or social contract is guaranteed. Mr DOB embodies one nexus of the cute and the superflat. As a caricature of Mickey Mouse, Mr DOB began as a cute, cuddly figure. But in a series of work spanning over three decades, Murakami has transformed DOB into a Gremlin-​like creature that grows increasingly deformed and violent. His DOB totem pole encapsulates the metamorphoses of the cute into the grotesque. At the very bottom of the picture stands an innocent-​looking DOB, his arms outstretched and ready for a hug. Standing on top are three variations of himself that appear severely distorted and menacing. The stylistic mutilation of DOB reflects the aggression always present in the subject’s relation to the cute thing.52 The more hyper-​cute something is, the more implicated it is in violence.53 But the cute thing is not simply a victim of violence; it, too, can inflict violence. At the top of the totem pole, a not-​so-​adorable DOB bares his sharp fangs, as he does in 727, ready to bite off anything that comes too close. Violence is inherent in the production of superflatness. As Thomas Lamarre explains, ‘superflat implies that something is not simply flat but very, very flat –​complexly flat. To make something look superflat, you have to begin with layers that introduce the possibility of depth and then crush it’.54 The crushing of depth is akin to the squeezing of the cute object triggered by the ‘Aww’ response. The absence of depth in the superflat, however, does not mean the destruction of layers. Rather, superflatness emerges when all the complex layers have equal visual importance on the surface: background appears as significant as foreground. In DOB totem pole the monochromatic background is but one layer among many. Squeezed by cuteness, Mr DOB gives birth to deformed permutations of himself; every iteration is a distinct layer. By exhibiting all versions of DOB on the same plane, Murakami obliterates all distinctions among them; the grotesque incarnations are as important as the cute original. A similar logic of crushing and squeezing is at work in Sir Thopas. Burrow’s suggestive observation that Sir Thopas may stand as a ‘cartoon’, points to an aesthetic, affective and narrative flatness that

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Figure 4.2  Takashi Murakami, DOB totem pole, 2000. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board; 600 × 600 mm (© 2000 Takashi Murakami/​ Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin. Permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

characterises the tale.55 A short poem, it is nonetheless excessive in the number of catalogues of stereotypical attributes, activities and objects found in Middle English popular romances. Charbonneau observes that Sir Thopas is ‘not really a tale at all, but is instead a hodgepodge of common rhetorical devices and popular plot motifs’.56 Each list can be viewed as a textual ‘layer’, and Chaucer, like Murakami, does not rank or differentiate between the layers. Thopas’s background story is indistinct from any other object, act

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or trait associated with him. The fact that Thopas ‘Yborn he was in fer contree, /​In Flaundres, al biyonde the see’ (VII.718–​19) is no more or less important than the ‘lilie flour’ (VII.907) adorning the top of his helmet. The poem has no narrative centre or climax, no hierarchy among its literary elements and no emotional or intellectual depth. Horizontality dominates the tale instead. Nothing seems to happen plot-​wise: actions are announced but endlessly deferred; desires are professed yet never consummated; and Thopas experiences no maturation. Movement manifests as sideways slides across the narrative: Thopas’s prikynge figures the poem’s horizontal motions, the pangs of its erotic charge and the sharp wounds of its cuteness. Sir Thopas is a cartoon whose literary layers are crushed and cute bodies squeezed. It is a site where the hyper-​cute (Thopas) meets the hyper-​violent (Olifaunt). While the Host cutifies Chaucer the pilgrim through feminisation and infantilisation, Chaucer cutifies his tale by flattening it. Sir Thopas is not simply a cheap parody of Middle English popular romance; it is a superflat romance. In several medieval manuscripts of Sir Thopas –​notably the Ellesmere; the Hengwrt; Cambridge, University Library MS Dd. 4.24; and Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 4.27 –​the layout displays the poem as a decentred and dehierarchised text. In the Ellesmere manuscript, for example, the poem’s stanzaic unit is broken into separate columns across the page: the first column on the left contains the four-​beat couplets; the middle column, the three-​beat tails; and in the third column, the occasional one-​beat bobs from Fits 1 and 2 appear. The columns are linked by a series of brackets that indicate the rhymed words and the relationships among individual lines. Rhiannon Purdie calls the layout of the Thopas manuscripts ‘graphic tail-​ rhyme’, and Jessica Brantley 57 terms it ‘displayed tail-​rhyme’. The visual layout of Sir Thopas is most likely Chaucer’s own design.58 Scholars have read the layout as a joke and a mess.59 But instead of treating it as a visual joke, I contend that the Thopas layout works in ways similar to those of a superflat image. The graphic/​displayed tail-​rhyme ruptures the rigid verticality of the poetic form. Horizontality structures the poem’s ordinatio (the composition of elements on a manuscript page) and mirrors the diffuse lateral orientation of the narrative. The result is a superflat poetic space.

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Figure 4.3  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas. San Marino, Huntington MS El 26.C.9 (Ellesmere), fol. 152r. (Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

The most unsettling disruptions of the poem’s coherence are the five bobs in Fits 1 and 2. The bobs appear to reinforce the visual joke of Sir Thopas and are symptomatic of Chaucer’s feigned ineptitude. Critics have interpreted them as vapid, incongruous and extraneous afterthoughts.60 Ad Putter has argued that ‘perhaps the funniest thing about them is that they have no business being there at all’.61 The out-​of-​placeness of bobs, moreover, reflects the ostracisation of an elvish Chaucer on the edge of the pilgrim fellowship. Gaylord, citing its musical origins, suggests that a bob is ‘a break in the regularity of the verse … For it is musical and metrical, and adds to the “daintiness” of the poet’s production’.62 Rather than symptoms of poetic inferiority, the bobs enhance the aesthetic appeal of Sir Thopas. The squeeze of cuteness provides an alternative reading of the poem’s physical layout. Sir Thopas is a cute object under duress and being squeezed ever tighter; like a plush toy, it bulges in some places and flattens in others. The bobs appear when the poem’s internal tension demands release. Like permutations of Murakami’s DOB, the bobs are protuberances of the Chaucerian corpus. In Fit 1, four bobs break out of the tail-​rhyme stanzas when Thopas enters

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greater emotional agitation and violence. The first bob, ‘In towne’ (VII.793), bursts forth as Thopas’s desire for the elf-​queen pushes him to renounce all mortal women. ‘Towne’ signifies Thopas’s urban identity and serves as a switch point between the human and the supernatural. The second bob, ‘So wilde’ (VII.803), occurs as Thopas moves into the volatile space of Fairyland, leaving behind the safe and ordered space of town. As Olifaunt confronts Thopas, he threatens to slay his horse ‘With mace’ (VII.813), the third bob. The fourth bob, ‘Thy mawe’ (VII.823), as either Olifaunt’s stomach or jaw, anticipates the traumatic dismemberment of the body. A similar though diminished movement is at work in Fit 2. When the poem’s fifth and final bob, ‘In londe’ (VII.887), appears, Thopas is once again riding away from the city and into the wild. The layout of Sir Thopas may be a joke, but the tale is being squeezed and deformed into a line here and a word there. Put differently, the bobs resemble DOB’s grotesque eyes floating in a superflat space. If ordinatio is meant to help readers find their way around a manuscript, the displayed tail-​rhyme of Sir Thopas instead sets up roadblocks that frustrate the reading experience. The poem’s fractured layout simultaneously challenges sequential linearity and renders poetic elements into ‘interchangeable and easily rearrangeable units’.63 Without an obvious roadmap, ‘the hapless reader hesitates, backtracks and repeats himself or herself while struggling through the maze of brackets, scattered lines and drifting bob-​lines’.64 Sir Thopas becomes a kind of premodern choose-​your-​ own-​adventure book that allows for a variety of non-​linear vertical and horizontal readings. Navigating one’s way through the poem is not unlike the experience of looking at a Murakami painting. Just as there is no correct point of view in a dehierarchised and decentred superflat space, Sir Thopas affords its reader the freedom to scan it from any angle, zoom in on any section at a time and assemble the poetic fragments into meaningful images. Each column or row constitutes a separate signifying layer. For instance, the depiction of Thopas’s feverish ride in Fit 1 yields radically different readings depending on the grouping of lines. The Riverside Chaucer renders the stanza as: Sire Thopas fil in love-​longynge, Al whan he herde the thrustel synge

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And pryked as he were wood. His faire steede in his prikynge So swatte that men myghte him wryng; His sydes were al blood. (VII.772–​7)

In this vertical sequence, the horse is covered in blood. However, if the stanza were read horizontally across the columns from left to right, the two tails –​‘And pryked as he were wood’ (774) and ‘His sydes were al blood’ (777) –​together form a third couplet in the middle of the page. The Middle English ‘his’ denotes either the third-​person singular neuter or the third-​person singular masculine. In this horizontal grouping, Thopas is the one who bleeds. The horizontal reading of Sir Thopas parallels the narrative’s sideways motion of desire, dainty yet violent, in a cutified, superflat poetic space. The tale’s lateral orientation is not dissimilar from the signature sideways movement in Japanese anime from the 1970s, one of the main influences on the superflat aesthetic. Due to budget constraints and weekly deadlines, animators resorted to simulating motion by looping banks of cells with flat backgrounds at a low frame rate.65 To the viewer, the result is an illusion of motion across a non-​perspectival space without depth: ‘Rather than move into the landscape, you seem to move across it, soaring, speeding, spinning, wheeling’.66 In the flattened space in Sir Thopas, maidens pine for Thopas’s love while remaining ‘bright in [their] bour’ (VII.742). The Middle English bour (‘bower’ or ‘bed’), Felicity Riddy explains, is ‘not only a place, but a state of feeling: it is where the emotional dynamism of the plot is generated’ in romance.67 Thopas never enters the affect-​and plot-​generating bour. Space alone does not generate emotional dynamism in Sir Thopas; it is movement across textual loci that galvanises emotion. The singing of birds and the dream of the elf-​queen may trigger love-​longing in Thopas, but first he needs to get to the fair forest (VII.754) and the soft grass (VII.779) where such things are possible. What appears to be narrative stagnation and aesthetic flatness in Sir Thopas has perpetuated negative assessments of the poem’s artistic merits. The movements of Thopas and his horse, from pricking (Fits 1 and 2) to ambling (Fit 2) to gliding (Fit 3), have been understood as the poem’s figurative enactment of its bumpy meter. Prikynge, in particular, symbolises the rambling quality of

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a narrative that is at most ‘an aimless campaign of pricking here and pricking there’.68 For Helen Storm Corsa, ‘nothing in the poem seems to move’.69 This is not true. One of the formulaic verbs for riding in Middle English romances, prikynge appears no fewer than eight times in Sir Thopas. The tale may feel stalled because its internal movements have been conflated with those in a perspectival narrative space that projects an illusion of emotional and intellectual depth. In a superflat space, depth and verticality are obliterated. Prikynge in Sir Thopas is never vertical but horizontal, mirroring the poem’s layout and the orientation of its erotic charge. Compare prikynge in a vertical, perspectival romance to that in a horizontal, superflat counterpart. Towards the end of the Knight’s Tale, Arcite defeats Palamon and wins Emily in a duel. In front of a stadium packed with cheering spectators, Arcite takes his victory lap and claims his prize: This fierse Arcite hath of his helm ydon, And on a courser, for to shewe his face, He priketh endelong the large place Lokynge upward upon this Emelye; And she agayn hym caste a freendlich ye … And was al his chiere, as in his herte. (I.2676–​83)

Arcite’s pricking allows him to demonstrate publicly his fierse chivalric masculinity and to generate the vertical distance between him and Emily. Re-​enacting the spatial logic of courtly love, Arcite looks up at his Lady, the elevated object of his adoration; Emily reciprocates the gaze by casting a friendly eye down towards him. The visual exchange between the two, upward and downward, establishes Arcite’s identity as a soldier of love and Emily’s role as a gift in the traffic in women. Thopas, unlike Arcite, does not prance about to recreate a vertical model of love and masculinity. The collapse of vertical layers in a superflat text leads to a downward squeeze that forces the narrative to move sideways. Under duress, Thopas runs here and there. He ‘priketh thurgh a fair forest’ (VII.754), ‘north and est’ (VII.757), ‘over stile and stoon’ (VII.798), ‘on the softe gras’ (VII.779) and ‘over hill and dale’ (VII.837). In the absence of depth, Thopas’s movement is lateral and frenetic. If he ‘pryked as he were

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wood’ (774), Thopas’s mad ride is not for naught. Despite Thopas’s profession of love for the elf-​queen, she never appears in the flesh nor casts a loving look at him. His dream of the elf-​queen occurs during a brief break in the midst of his pricking. The movement of Sir Thopas is not about the vertical hierarchy between the lover and the beloved; instead, it is about the woundedness of desire. The verb priken means to pierce and wound, and the noun prike denotes sharp pain or torment.70 In place of chivalric masculinity, Thopas has at best a cute and prickly masculinity. Thopas’s aimless galloping mirrors the difficult ambling of Chaucer’s poetic lines. Knight errantry, Seth Lerer suggests, is both a compositional device and a performative strategy, the romance quest motif corresponds to the rhetorical device of inventio, the discovery of discursive topics.71 The goal of heroic pricking and poetic making, however, is not necessarily the discovery of topics or objects but the horizontal movement among bodies, things and signs. Thopas’s intention is not to pursue the elf-​queen but to ‘touch’ romance object clusters. In so doing, he spreads cuteness as if it were a contagion. Affect moves like an epidemic, for ‘[b]‌odies can catch feeling as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear’.72 When Thopas ‘glood /​As sparcle out of the bronde’ (VII.904–​5), he moves like a fiery pricasour who cutifies everything with which he comes into contact.

Sticky, sugary, shitty Affect is contagious because it is object-​bound, for there can be no affect without a material body. As it moves laterally through space, affect encounters other bodies, objects and signs. Working from Edmund Husserl’s concept of the ‘near sphere’, Sara Ahmed theorises that affect adheres to objects and signs around it to form an intimate bodily horizon.73 The means of attachment is the viscid surface of the object under affection: ‘Stickiness … is about what objects do to other objects –​it involves a transference of affect’.74 Marked by horizontality, regression and viscidity, affect is perfectly suited for the depthless space of the superflat.

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Cuteness in Sir Thopas displays the agglutinating property of affect. Specifically, the stickiness of cuteness in Thopas is linked to the poem’s preoccupation with regressive, infantile sweetness and with sugar that has the capacity to assume a glutinous texture under the stress of heat or the pressure of touch. Thopas is ‘sweete as is the brembul flour’ (VII.746). And because cuteness is by nature both aesthetic and affect, its stickiness also works on the aesthetic level; that is, a cute thing adheres to and cutifies other objects upon contact. A taste concept at its root, cuteness sometimes manifests itself as food. Ngai cites the example of Kogepan, an anthropomorphised piece of slightly burnt bun created by the Japanese company San-​ X, whose edibility is an index of its cuteness. Holding the appetising Kogepan, the subject cannot resist the desire to devour it, as if saying: ‘You’re so cute I could just eat you up’.75 Thopas, according to Chaucer, is pale as ‘pandemayn’ (725). With white bread as face and saffron-​coloured hair and beard, Thopas is literally an edible figure.76 Like Kogepan, Thopas’s body invites handling and eating; his cuteness invokes consumption. The use of sugar to make a sweet, claylike substance that could be moulded into decorative artwork has an old history. Marzipan was used in royal French feasts in the thirteenth century. Confectionery artists in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance crafted subtleties for luxury dining: elaborate sugar sculptures that served as centrepieces at banquets. The marriage banquet of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre in 1403 included sotelte [subtlety] on its menu.77 In 2014, Kara Walker exhibited a temporary installation titled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby inside the defunct Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. In addition to the main sculpture –​a giant female sphinx with the face of a black mammy coated in white sugar –​Walker created twelve life-​sized black sugar babies either coated with or made up entirely of molasses. The encounter with the edible sculptures was sensual and eerie: cute faces and bodies melted in the summer heat while releasing the pungent scent of molasses that saturated one’s nose, pores and tongue. Cute, sweet and delicious, Thopas resembles a late medieval subtlety. But he is also a sugar baby who avidly consumes victuals and romances, an epicurean with a sweet tooth. In the midst of his arming scene in Fit 2, Thopas demands that his servants bring him

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Figure 4.4  Kogepan. (Artefact from author’s private collection. Photo: Walter Naegle. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

‘sweete wyn’ (VII.851), ‘mede’ (VII.852), ‘roial spicerye’ (VII.853), ‘gyngebreed that was ful fyn’ (VII.854), ‘lycorys’ (VII.855), ‘comyn’ (VII.855) and finally, ‘sugre that is trye’ (VII.856). Descriptions of sumptuous feasts are common in Middle English romances. However, Sir Thopas is unusual for its emphasis on sweetness and spices.78 Gaylord mocks Thopas as ‘a sugared dainty who smells good himself [and] rides through fragrant fields’; and C. David Benson calls him a ‘gingerbread knight’, likening the poem to cloyingly sweet cotton candy.79

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Figure 4.5  Kara Walker, African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from ‘A Subtelty, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby’ installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. (Bananas), 2014. Cast pigmented polyester resin with polyurethane coating, molasses, brown sugar. 59.5 × 20 × 19 inches. (Photo: Jason Wyche. Reproduced by permission of artist © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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Cutification is affective objectification. The modern cute object, in its exaggerated passivity, is the commodity fetish par excellence. Late capitalism is marked by the mingling of ‘cute’ art and commerce. The romance of cuteness’ objectification, Ngai argues, involves a nostalgic return, made possible by shrinking scale and distance, to the domestic world of comfort and security: ‘By returning us to a simpler, sensuous world of domestic use and consumption … cuteness is the pastoral fantasy that, somehow, the commodity’s qualitative side as use-​value, or as a product of concrete, phenomenological labor, can be extracted and therefore ‘rescued’.80 While the world of Sir Thopas is not the same as that of the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century romance of the domestic sphere, an analogous logic is at work in the tale, albeit in the context of early capitalism in late medieval Western Europe. Flanders, where Thopas was born and resides, was an urban, mercantile landscape defined by a proto-​capitalist economy. As Wallace points out, medieval Flemish urbanites were avid consumers of French or French-​derived romances; and Flemish, like English, is a hybridised tongue.81 ‘Flaundres’ serves as a signifying mirror to England due to the two cultures’ proximity.82 A cutified Flemish knight therefore reflects a dainty English poet; both become proto-​commodities ready for consumption. J. Allan Mitchell characterises Sir Thopas as a narrative full of product placements, ‘a kind of virtual emporium’ deeply entrenched within the marketplace.83 The poem’s numerous allusions to objects of trade –​such as cordewane (Cordovan leather), hosen broun (hosiery from Bruges), syklatoun (silk), mazelyn (drinking bowl) and other objects –​highlight bourgeois domesticity and specialised manufacture. Dominated by an effeminate boyish knight who pricks here and there, Sir Thopas might be more accurately identified as a cute pastoral. Thopas desires not to win the elf-​queen per se, but to rescue the use-​value of commodities within his near sphere of cuteness for consumption. The emporium that is Sir Thopas is not unlike the space of consumption within a Starbucks. Born in the 1970s, then expanded and institutionalised in the 1980s and 1990s, the history of the multinational cafe chain is entrenched in late capitalism and the politics of recognition. Starbucks designs its stores to be what Ray Oldenburg terms ‘the third place’, in between home and work. It is

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‘a warm and welcoming environment’ that embodies the corporate mission ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit’.84 Co-​opting the language of safe space, Starbucks as the Third Place is attuned to the well-​being of customers: you relax into a couch that promises comfort, what Ahmed describes as a ‘sinking’ feeling that indexes your ease with the environment.85 Starbucks offers a faux cosmopolitanism in which difference and market are conflated (you can sample coffee from around the world), and the politics of recognition becomes the governance of corporate attunement. But what Starbucks sells as ‘culture’ is really ‘culturalism’, a ‘procedure by which everything melts into culture’, as Shu-​Mei Shih explains.86 Difference is sublimated into a corporate social good, free to circulate, sink into or detain. In 2015, Starbucks waged a disastrous campaign that asked baristas and customers to ‘Race Together’.87 It failed because the Third Place as a technology of attunement produces corporate diversity but is unable to recognise real-​ world differences that cannot be contained. Then in 2018, two black men were arrested inside a Philadelphia Starbucks. The incident rapidly morphed from a white manager complaining about two gentlemen refusing to make a purchase or leave, to the police labelling the incident as ‘a group of males causing a disturbance’, to the legal charge of trespassing.88 What might be the space of sinking comfort for some is ‘the sunken place’ of violence for others.89 Curiously, a tender loving squeeze also makes a surface sink into itself and generate cavities. The Third Place becomes ‘the hold’: the state of detention, the hold of a slave ship. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney argue, the hold is the logisticality of modernity, of capitalism as a movement of things.90 (I will return to Moten and Harney’s theory of the hold in the Conclusion.) If neoliberalism aims to secure the flow of global capital, then the alleged refusal to make a purchase or leave interpellates coloured bodies as out of tune with the safe space of commerce. A keen observer of human management, middle-​class comforts and pretensions and culture and commerce, Chaucer may be the first Starbucks poet. The Canterbury Tales project is at its heart concerned with the politics of recognition, especially its imbrications with identity and difference. And Sir Thopas is where differences

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are flattened into the merely material, which is repackaged as the cultural. As a ‘third space,’ the tale is a superflat space composed of objects. Alternatively, the tale can be conceived of as a giant household organised around cuteness. As he pricks about the poem, Thopas adheres to and cutifies objects, bodies and signs within his bodily horizon. In lieu of a recognisable plot, the poem is structured by a series of romance motifs that might be better conceived of as cute and sticky ‘object clusters’ that include Thopas’s physical attributes (VII.724–​ 35 and 736–​ 41), spices (VII.760–​ 5), birds (VII.766–​74), food (VII.851–​6), arms and weapons (VII.857–​83) and romance heroes (VII.897–​ 900, 916)91. An avid consumer, Thopas does not discriminate among categories of things. His desire for texts is the same as his desire for objects. He enjoys sweet treats while demanding his ‘mynstrales /​And geestours’ (VII.845–​6) recount ‘romances that been roiales, /​Of popes and of cardinales, /​ And eek of love-​likynge’ (VII.848–​50).92 The logic of object clusters explains why Thopas, in the midst of his arming scene, swears ‘on ale and breed’ (VII.872) instead of saints, God or aristocratic objects such as heron, swan or peacock. The formation of object clusters is culturalisation in action. There is no affective or aesthetic difference among armour, romance and bread; all signifiers are rendered equally cute and sweet by a Midas-​like Thopas. As Mary Carruthers has shown, in medieval rhetoric, moreover, sweetness was explicitly associated with ‘well-​crafted words of oratory’.93 With its deliberate evocations of minstrelsy, Sir Thopas blurs the categorical barrier between signification and taste: each sign is a sweet delicacy. Chaucer’s words, like Thopas’s body parts, are cutified victuals; affect and aesthetic are legible and edible. Cutification is also a taming of unruly wild things. It is not inaccurate to speak of the domestic sphere as a household ecology, for domesticity is rooted in domestication.94 When selectively bred to enhance their docility, Siberian silver foxes began to exhibit cute features characteristic of Lorenz’s child schema after five generations: rounder, dog-​like body parts and friendly behaviour.95 Children, too, may require taming as they develop. One of the goals of education as domestication is the enhancement of the child’s submissiveness and therefore cuteness. And in the absence of real children, child-​like things are the next best substitute. Although the

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cute object ‘asks that we treat it as though it were something like an infant’ requiring tender loving care, it also demands mastery and discipline.96 Sir Thopas is Chaucer’s thought experiment on what happens when cute objects come ‘alive’ and take over the household; the poem is a nursery filled with child-​like things. Thopas’s quest is to tame all his cutified commodities qua children. The childish nature of cute objects, in between unruliness and docility, allows them to function as D. W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’: things that infants depend on during an intermediate phase between an existence without any distinction between the self and the outer world, and full awareness of an external reality separate from the self. As part of both the infant’s body and outer reality, the transitional object bridges the two realms and provides defence against a child’s anxiety.97 Typically soft and squeezable, it is ‘affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated … [It] must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and … pure aggression’.98 The transitional object represents not simply the nurturing breast but the good-​enough mother –​the source of sustenance that the child has falsely assumed to be a part of their body –​who must usher the child from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Maturation is complete when the infant realises that the good-​enough mother is never part of themselves. However, disillusionment requires illusion first, and the transitional object provides a safe maternal substitute during the process. The cute object’s soft tactility, its triggering of care and violence and its capacity for survival all contribute to its psychic identity as the paradigmatic transitional object. In Sir Thopas, the elf-​queen may appear to be the absent good-​enough mother. But she, like the clusters of things in the tale, is simply another transitional object. A good-​enough mother never materialises; her presence would require the depth and interiority that a superflat romance does not provide. The doubling of the transitional object as the good-​ enough mother can be problematic. When disillusionment does not take place, the transitional object fails to deliver the maturation and independence promised to the child. While cute objects in Sir Thopas function as transitional objects, they ultimately fail as such. Thopas himself never grows up, fights a giant, and wins his lady. He remains within the domestic sphere of cute things. But household

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and family are not the same thing; Thopas may have a household, but he has no family. Cutified sticky objects have replaced companionate marriage and heteronormative procreation. Almost devoid of sexuality except for his band of ‘myrie men’ (VII.839), Thopas’s household is cutely queer. Yet the poem’s rejection of a reproductive teleology is not the same as the absence of movement or desire. Thopas’s queer desire for cute things moves sideways; the objects he hoards and consumes are his children. As a superflat romance, Sir Thopas’s surface is what Lamarre terms ‘a densely packed distributive field –​a sort of information field’ where connections among elements are shifting and never static.99 The object clusters in Sir Thopas operate much like the proliferating anime eyes of Mr DOB; they are spectral signs for objects and not objects themselves. Thopas moves about the distributive field of the tale seeking signifying patterns. When he has ‘foond, in a pryve woon, /​The contree of Fairye /​So wilde’ (VII.801–​3), has Thopas really left the comforts of his home? The details are a little fuzzy. The Riverside Chaucer glosses woon as ‘place’, but the word could also mean ‘a house’ or ‘a room or chamber in a house’.100 It is possible that Thopas never escapes cosy domesticity; the fairyland of romance turns out to be a private room. Yet the household does not guarantee security; home is accommodating because it is ‘a place where bodies are both vulnerable and safe’.101 The cute and the sugary may nestle in Sir Thopas, but they cannot hide an inherent vulnerability that invites aggression. ‘Aww’ can quickly degenerate into ‘Yuck!’ Pleasure is fickle, and enjoyment of sweetness may suddenly turn into disgust. Cicero notes that ‘[t]‌aste is the most voluptuous of all the senses and more sensitive to sweetness [dulcitudo] than the rest, yet how quickly even it dislikes and rejects anything extremely sweet [dulce]! … [I]n all things the greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust’.102 The rapid shift from pleasure to revulsion accounts for the shame that cuteness generates in the subject.103 ‘Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee’ (VII.919), the Host cries out and cuts off Chaucer’s cutifying narrative. The interruption stages a major shift in the affective and aesthetic registers of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s first tale is so unbearable that the Host’s ‘eres aken’ (VII.923) because of its ‘drasty speche’ (VII.923), in the sense of

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its being ‘crappy, worthless’.104 And to drive home his point, the Host directly compares the tale to shit: ‘Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!’ (VII.930). In medieval medical treatises, honey and various sugars are sometimes prescribed to purge the body of excess and unhealthy humours. Sir Thopas is so sweet and so cute that the Host, having consumed it through listening, must shit it out. In a complete turnaround, Chaucer’s ‘deyntee thyng’ (VII.711) converts to ‘drasty rymyng’ (VII.930), and elvishness turns into ‘verray lewednesse’ (VII.921). Instead of ‘What man artow?’ (VII.695), the Host now asks, ‘What kind of shit is this?’105 The Host’s interruption underscores the affective fungibility of cuteness and disgust, the volatility of consumer desire and the unpredictability of commodity’s ability to provide gratification. Revulsion, like adoration, displays a Barthesian tautology that may be phrased as: ‘The disgusting is what is disgusting. Or, you repulse me because you are repulsive’. Without missing a beat, the Host halts the tale’s sideways prikynge right after the third iteration of Thopas’s arms and horse (VII.913). The minstrel tagline, ‘Til on a day –​’ (VII.918), is violently aborted. Crucially, the Host’s interruption reintroduces depth, hierarchy and gap between textual layers. The superflat space of Sir Thopas is shattered. The widening vertical distance resurrects the opposition between background and foreground, vehicle and tenor, and chaff and sentence. Formally, the interruption ends the tail-​rhyme doggerel of Sir Thopas and restores the couplet as the normative poetic unit of the Canterbury Tales. The Middle English priken can mean to ‘stimulate (the bowels to discharge)’.106 Thopas’s kinetic prikynge thus maps the journey of desire from consumption, to digestion, to expulsion. The faecality of the Host’s demeaning response to Sir Thopas ruptures a persistent fantasy about the nature of cute bodies. Part of the allure of the cute object is the simplicity of its body design, as ‘common negative anatomical features such as excremental organs are … omitted, giving the object a smooth, sanitized exterior’.107 Hello Kitty has neither a mouth nor an anus; she does not speak, eat or shit. The elimination of orifices sustains a parental fantasy that the cute thing is the ideal child, ‘the diaperless baby, the excretionless teddy bear, a low-​maintenance infant whom we can kiss and fondle free of anxiety’.108 If Hello Kitty requires no potty training, Sir Thopas is a

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bit more complicated. On the one hand, Thopas consumes commodities with a voracious appetite. On the other hand, he never defecates. Ingestion without defecation, however, places the body under increasing duress. By introducing turds, the Host upends the fantasy that cute bodies do not defecate. An adorable whelp may guide a Chaucerian narrator through a dreamscape in the Book of the Duchess, but when a poem is a ‘rym dogerel’ (VII.925), it may mean ‘the kind of thing that the dog brought in, or vomited up, or worse’.109 Winnicott observes that ‘[t]‌he transitional object may, because of anal erotic organization, stand for faeces’.110 Faeces can be good-​ enough mothers; or, good-​ enough mothers may become faeces. A more crucial implication of Winnicott’s remark is that adoration and revulsion cannot be easily sorted out; both provide erotic pleasures and defence against vulnerable transitions. The proximity of cuteness and disgust correlates with that of commodity and waste. The superflat Sir Thopas may resist hierarchy or distinction among things. But once depth and verticality are restored, both production and consumption generate waste.

Whiteness in the hold The force with which the Host rejects Sir Thopas recalls the violence accompanying the production of cuteness. As a coping strategy, cuteness is a mechanism of denial, deflection and deferral of trauma; cutification is ‘a ritualized and declawed sublimation of violence’.111 In the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, no other country has dominated the global phenomenon of cuteness as much as Japan, whose culture of kawaii emerged in the aftermath of the nation’s defeat in World War II and subsequent US occupation. Japan’s fall from imperialism led to a greatly diminished sense of itself as a military power. Norihiro Kato argues that cutification on a national scale in Japan neutralises ‘issues that are too painful to deal with by rendering them purely aesthetic, and harmless’.112 Japan’s sense of emasculation and impotence is mirrored in the image of the emperor as a cute little old man who commands adoration if not worship.113

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What is the trauma that needs cutification after the ‘miracle’ in the Prioress’s Tale, which left the pilgrims stunned ‘As sobre was that wonder was to se’ (VII.692)? The Prioress’s Tale is the hold of race, the crucible of anti-​Semitism, in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales. The hold exerts itself in three interlocking registers of religious figuration: history, politics and poetics. Historically, the tale conjures up medieval Jews, officially expelled from England in 1290, as a spectral, virtual presence.114 As Sylvia Tomasch notes, the Jews were ‘an internally colonized people’, living within the hold of ‘a Jewerye’ (VII.489), the ghetto.115 Politically, the Prioress reasserts the sovereign image of post-​Expulsion England –​both in her pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas Becket and in her evocation of the little St Hugh of Lincoln –​as a theocratic hold of Christian sanctity allegedly purified of Jewish pollution. And poetically, the tale’s rhyme royal stanzaic form spills into the Prologue to Sir Thopas; it holds onto the meta-​narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales. Jessica Brantley reads the stanzaic affinity between the two texts as evidence of the ‘interaction of romance and religion through form’.116 Building on Claire Waters’s insight that the Thopas link functions both as ‘a kind of hangover from the Prioress’s Tale’ and as a demonstration of ‘the shaping power of rhyme royal’ that would later define Chaucerianness in the fifteenth century, I contend that the form’s poetic shaping power derives and is indistinguishable from the power of race-​making; the rhyme royal is a racialising tool of the poetic maker.117 In fact, the Prioress–​Thopas link is a hold, for it is in the rhyme royal stanzas that the Host attempts to define, racialise and cutify the body of Geoffrey the narrator. The racial violence surrounding the Prioress’s Tale activates the logistics of recognition, as the Host quickly begins to check the bodies around him. ‘What man artow?’ (VII.695) he asks of Geoffrey, whose unrecognisability is one effect of racialisation in the Prioress’s Tale: the squeeze. In the absence of a Jew among the pilgrims, the elvish, popet-​like Geoffrey comes dangerously close to being marked as ‘Jewish’ due to his ambiguous body and his social apartness. While critical attention has focused primarily on the distinction between the Chaucer of Sir Thopas and the Chaucer of Melibee, equally important is the contrast between the Chaucer of the Prioress’s Tale and the Chaucer of Sir Thopas.118

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When the Host asks, ‘What man artow?’ he interrogates not only Chaucer as Geoffrey but also Chaucer as the Prioress. Breaking the fourth wall, the Host confronts Chaucer the maker: ‘What kind of man are you to have just written something like the Prioress’s Tale?’ The Host too exists in the hold of race, and he functions as the first reader-​critic of the Prioress’s Tale. Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson have examined the stymied state of the tale’s reception history, especially the critical desire to separate aesthetics from anti-​Semitism, and thereby to rehabilitate Chaucer’s reputation. The Prioress’s Tale is culturalised into ‘high art’; Chaucer the poetic aesthete cannot be an anti-​Semite.119 The wilful bifurcation is not dissimilar from the persistent critical insistence on the distinction between the genre of Sir Thopas and the mastery of Chaucer. The two categorical impulses originate in the same desire to elevate and preserve ‘Chaucer’ as a poetic commodity himself. Yet the hold of categorical thinking is the scene of critical misrecognition. At the intersection of desire, interest and language, identity is impossible.120 Should an uncongenial ‘Chaucer’, at this conjuncture, tune himself to be more likeable, helpful, courageous and kind? The hold will not let go. Chaucer, as well as all his audience, remains in the hold. Cuteness is required at this particular juncture in Fragment VII because of the trauma of racial and religious violence recounted by the Prioress. The tale of Sir Thopas, as Chaucer’s response to the Host’s racialised surveillance, enacts a form of racialisation that is different from and less obvious than those in the Squire’s Tale and in the Man of Law’s Tale. Flanders, the home of Thopas, witnessed the massacre and exile of Jews in 1370; yet such historical knowledge is buried within the tale’s geographic allusion and not obvious on the poem’s surface.121 The killing of Jews in the Prioress’s Tale is sublimated by Chaucer into a minor reference to Thopas’s plate armour (hawberk) as a product of ‘Jewes werk’ (VII.864). Saracens too register their presence in Sir Thopas, in the figure Olifaunt that invokes Termagaunt (VII.810), a Saracen god associated with Maumet, signifying both the prophet Mohammed and a puppet or idol.122 With Jews dehumanised to a mere object and Saracens figured as a violent but ineffectual elephant, Sir Thopas reimagines the Christian body. The dead body of the adorable singing

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clergeon, covered in faeces and left in a latrine in the Prioress’s Tale, transforms into the cute and superflat body of Thopas. The two boyish figures are further linked by a shared comparison to gems of chastity: the ‘emeraude’ (VII.609) that is the clergeon and the topaz of the knight’s namesake. If the Prioress’s Tale presents a diversity problem for the Canterbury Tales project, Sir Thopas represents Chaucer’s diversity management. That is, culturalisation displaces racialisation to the extent that, in Shih’s formulation, ‘the trauma of race and racism can be sidestepped’.123 The logic of Thopas’s household, like that of the tale itself, is what I would call the logic of ‘flat white’. Whiteness flattens itself: Thopas’s feminised and cutified white face is likened to white bread; whiteness signifies as ‘whiteface’, a culturalised deyntee thing emptied of race. His payndemayn-​like face further evokes ‘the wastel-​breed’ (I.147) that the Prioress feeds to her pet hounds. Her Epicurean performance easily outpaces that of the Franklin; the Prioress is a customer to whom a Starbucks would never be the hold. Rather, the Prioress produces the hold qua Starbucks in the apostrophe to Hugh of Lincoln at the end of her tale. Not simply a coda, gloss, reference or prayer, the concluding ‘Hugh’ stanza of the Prioress’s Tale is the hold of race. As an appeal to English history, the stanza effects a textual enshrinement of Hugh of Lincoln and alludes to the physical shrine of Hugh built by Edward I soon after the Edict of Expulsion in 1290.124 The Prioress, Anthony Bale observes, collapses both time and space; she accentuates the Jewish threat by bringing her narrative home, that is, to England, and by domesticating the fantasy of racial violence: ‘If the past is a foreign country (Asia) the present is home (Lincoln)’.125 However, the fantasy of a purified, properly Christian and post-​ Expulsion England remains within its own hold; the Prioress’s Tale, as Geraldine Heng might characterise it, is a self-​ reflexive ‘romance of England’ at best.126 The intertwinement of romance, religion and race, moreover, is made possible through the cultural aestheticisation of a Starbucks-​like domesticity. Brantley observes that the Prioress’s performance of aristocratic religiosity blurs any formal differences between religion and romance, and the

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indistinction carries over into Sir Thopas.127 The sign of ‘Hugh of Lincoln’, as a racialised shorthand, is simultaneously a devotional icon and a domesticated object made for consumption, not unlike the popular Middle English romances that Geoffrey lists frenetically in Sir Thopas. So, too, does the critical elevation of the Prioress’s Tale to the realm of high art turn it into a cultural good; it drifts within the currents of reception history, among the detritus of devotional commodities waiting for management, waste or otherwise. The Prioress’s Tale, as Kathy Lavezzo explains, is dominated by ‘images of flow, contact, and containment that oppose Christian purity and Jewish danger’.128 The privy, a ‘pit’ where the conspiratorial Jews ‘purgen hire entraille’ (VII.571–​3) and dump the corpse of the little clergeon, spatialises negatively the mercantile traffic of the late Middle Ages. The flow of medieval capital is racialised through violence and trauma. The ‘wardrobe’ (VII.572) is the hold through which the movement of filthy things – ​Jews – must pass. Lavezzo’s analysis of the Jewish privy resonates, for me, with Elizabeth Povinelli’s figuration of late liberalism’s topography of interest and desire as a tubular network of interconnected pumps: ‘Indeed, perhaps the best way of conceiving these circuits of identity, accumulation, and circulation –​circuits that are simultaneously dependent on and independent of the nation-​state –​are tubular, or better, pneumonic. They are forms of suction in which extraction and flight are part of the same process’.129 Note the downward sinking into precarity, into abjection and into the pit. The clergeon’s unstoppable singing from the privy signifies the triumph of whiteness as a guarantor of racial purity; it also sets in motion the sonic flow of faith as capital, demarcating the hold in the Prioress’s Tale. His voice recalls that of the Prioress, who ‘soong the service dyvyne, /​Entuned in hir nose ful semely’ (I.122–​3). The effect of the clergeon’s singing, however, is utter flatness, as he is silenced by the abbot and as the Prioress turns to Hugh of Lincoln. And by the time of Sir Thopas, whiteness has become flat because it is out of tune with the racial reality of the hold generated by the Prioress’s Tale. The flat white is the misrecognition of race and the failure of attunement –​the state of precarity.

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Ugly survival Without a privy, Sir Thopas presents itself as a poetic Starbucks, a congenial narrative space of fuzzy comforts where goods and romances are in the flow of things. Wearing his hawberk, Thopas nonetheless conjures up a Jewish spectre that cannot be conjured away.130 Chaucer’s reference to ‘Jewes werk’ (VII.864) may be an attribution to medieval Jews’ reputation for quality craftsmanship and for ‘fine and dainty work’.131 By equating Jewish work with dainty work, the cuteness of Sir Thopas enfolds Jewish spectrality within it. But adapting cuteness as a coping mechanism for trauma means that the dainty easily degenerates into the shitty. Nonetheless, there is a difference between actual turd and textual turd. Barthes notes that ‘when written, shit does not have an odour … we receive not the slightest whiff, only the abstract sign of something unpleasant’.132 Textual excrement signifies language’s power to deny, ignore and dissociate reality –​not unlike the sublimation of violence via cuteness. When he complains that Chaucer’s ‘drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord’ (VII.930), the Host disavows a direct exchange value between bad poetry and turd; nevertheless, his words effectively establish their association in the first place. What he offers is a sign of shit and not shit itself. This implicit distinction is crucial to the reception history of the tale, since the labile fungibility of cuteness and disgust makes it possible for readers to adore and reject the poem simultaneously. To salvage Sir Thopas and therefore Chaucer the auctor, critical reception has replicated the ‘Aww’ and ‘Yuck’ responses to cute shame: to adore and denigrate, to protect and squeeze. The poem is ‘a gem in a dunghill’ that is ‘wonderfully awful’.133 Sir Thopas exemplifies what Julia Boffey terms ‘designer doggerel’, dreadful verse that is deliberately bad.134 The doubly articulated appraisal of Sir Thopas is mapped onto the bifurcated persona that is ‘Chaucer’: the brilliant master poet and the incompetent hack.135 Faced with the aesthetic challenge –​‘How can you like this piece of shit?’ –​the critic activates affects and converts a cloyingly sweet disgust back into an ugly cuteness that only a mother would love. The Host who invites Chaucer to speak and the Host who interrupts him are both right. Sir Thopas is shit, but it is odourless, cute shit.

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Sir Thopas survives parasitically on the corpus of the Canterbury Tales. And by enduring, it bears witness to the market survivability of cuteness. The cute thing always pricks about and sticks around; its stickiness is shitty or sugary. Cute shame is white shame, the sinking, shitting and flattening kind that sticks around. If, in Sir Thopas, Chaucer mocks the tastes of the emerging middle strata in late medieval English society, the gentil aesthetic he so accurately captures is ambivalent and fickle, drasty and deyntee.136 *** By now, we have seen how premodern whiteness operates through fragility and precarity. Fragility delineates the limits of courtly love in white* masculine performances of mourning as self-​defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; and precarity registers the ruptures within normative values of an imagined white* Christendom by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation. Yet as the precaritisation and cutification of medieval Jews demonstrate, premodern whiteness does participate actively in tactics of racialisation, be they religious conversion or aesthetic figuration. Crucially within premodernity, whiteness as racial difference –​refracted through culturalisation and aestheticisation –​does not simply or necessarily involve the somatic, the human or the animate. Medieval operations of whiteness are first and foremost object relations before they are human corporealisations, for whiteness is frequently experienced primarily as a material colour. In the last section of the book, I consider whiteness as an operation of medieval race that is not exclusively biopolitical but geontopolitical and affecto-​logistical. I return to the example of the King of Tars and argue that conversion operates as a tentacular asterisk that affixes white* to some bodies but not others. Racial difference, perceived as colour and religious difference, is rooted in a blind refusal to distinguish body, flesh and stone. I then examine the interlocking processes of periodisation and racialisation in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. Premodern racial capitalism, especially white capitalism, traffics in gentillesse as cultural capital through the figure of an affective hold of transhistorical, inter-​species and cross-​racial empathy.

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Notes 1 Frances Richard, ‘Fifteen Theses on the Cute’, Cabinet, 4 (2001), 95. 2 Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15:1 (2002), 106. 3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edn, 1987). Citations by line numbers. 4 For Sir Thopas as a parody, see Joanne A. Charbonneau, ‘Sir Thopas’, in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp.  649–​ 714; and Seth Lerer, ‘  “Now holde youre mouth”: The Romance of Orality in the Thopas–​Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales’, in Mark C. Amodio (ed.), Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 181–​205. As a satire, see Alan T. Gaylord, ‘The “Miracle” of Sir Thopas’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 6 (1984), 65–​ 84. As a burlesque, see E. T. Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), p. 1098; and Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 162. As a joke, see Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 102. As a nursery rhyme, see Alan T. Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel”: The “Elvyssh” Prosody of Sir Thopas’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1979), 83–​ 104. And as a childish fantasy, see C. David Benson, ‘Their Telling Difference: Chaucer the Pilgrim and His Two Contrasting Tales’, Chaucer Review, 18:1 (1983), 61–​76. 5 On the status of the merchant-​ knight in late medieval English society, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 22–​4. While the two groups do not always overlap, the designation signals the fluidity of social and occupational categories. For the label ‘bourgeois gentry’, see Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance: Family, Marriage, Intimacy’, in Roberta L. Krueger (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–​52. 6 Joshua Paul Dale, ‘The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency’, in Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre and Diane Negra (eds), The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 35–​55; and Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 2.

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7 Konrad Lorenz, ‘Die angebornen Formen moglicher Erfahrung’, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 5 (1943), 235–​409; Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, vol. 2, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 154; and John Morreall, ‘Cuteness’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 31:1 (1991), 40. 8 Sianne Ngai, ‘The Cuteness of the Avant-​Garde’, Critical Inquiry, 31:4 (2005), 814–​6. 9 MED, s.v. ‘popet’, a. 10 Gaylord, ‘The “Miracle” of Sir Thopas’, 68; and Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, p. 104, original emphasis. 11 OED, s.v. ‘dainty’, 2 and 4. 12 Morreall, ‘Cuteness’, 40. 13 Lori Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 186. 14 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 213. 15 Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, p. 186. 16 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Living Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 33 (2011), 59. 17 Ibid., p. 59. 18 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 21. 19 Gary D. Sherman and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust: The Humanizing and Dehumanizing Effects of Emotion’, Emotion Review, 3:3 (2011), 249. 20 Carroll Camden, Jr, ‘The Physiognomy of Thopas’, Review of English Studies 11:43 (1935), 326–​7. 21 Ann S. Haskell, ‘Sir Thopas: The Puppet’s Puppet’, Chaucer Review, 9:3 (1975), 260 n.4. 22 Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 90. 23 Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, p. 104. 24 Charbonneau, ‘Sir Thopas’, p. 655. 25 For topaz’s qualities, see John Conley, ‘The Peculiar Name Thopas’, Studies in Philology, 73:1 (1976), 42–​61. 26 John A. Burrow, ‘ “Sir Thopas”: An Agony in Three Fits’, Review of English Studies, ns 22:85 (1971), 57. 27 OED, s.v. ‘cute’. 28 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, p. 87.

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29 Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 5, original emphasis. 30 Ibid., p. 3. 31 Ngai, ‘Cuteness of the Avant-​Garde’, 817. 32 Joel Gn, ‘A Lovable Metaphor: On the Affect, Language and Design of “Cute” ’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2:1 (2016), 50. 33 Ibid., 52. 34 Beryl Rowland, ‘ “Elvyssh by His Contenaunce” ’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Proceedings, 2 (1986), 9. 35 Ngai, ‘Cuteness of the Avant-​Garde’, 816. 36 For Chaucer’s unrecognizability, see Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, p. 97; for his undecidability, see Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 177. 37 Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, p. 97. 38 Brian J. McVeigh, ‘How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool and Camp: “Consumutopia” versus “Control” in Japan’, Journal of Material Culture, 5:2 (2000), 253. 39 Gn, ‘A Lovable Metaphor’, 51. 40 Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 58, my emphasis. 41 I am indebted to Eve Sedgwick’s foundational work on shame, shyness and queerness. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 63. For ‘elvishness’ as denoting the otherworldly, see Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 99; and as absence and reserve, see John A. Burrow, ‘Elvish Chaucer’, in M.  Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (eds), The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English Literature in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), p. 111. 42 Michael D. Snediker, ‘Fuzzy Logic’, in L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts, ed. Eileen A. Joy (New York: punctum books, 2013), p. 292. 43 Dale, ‘Appeal of the Cute Object’, p. 40. 44 See Takashi Murakami, Super Flat (Tokyo: Madra, 2000), where he used the term ‘super flat’; critics later condensed it to ‘superflat’. 45 For studies of the superflat, see Hiroki Azuma, ‘Super Flat Speculation’, in Murakami, Super Flat, pp. 139–​51; Michael Darling, ‘Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness’, Art Journal, 60:3 (2001), 76–​89; Thomas

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Lamarre, ‘The Multiplanar Image’, Mechademia, 1 (2006), 120–​43; and Deborah Shamoon, ‘The Superflat Space of Japanese Anime’, in Lilian Chee and Edna Lim (eds), Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 93–​108. 46 Azuma, ‘Super Flat Speculation’, p. 141. 47 Murakami, Super Flat, p. 9. 48 Ibid., p. 15. 49 Azuma, ‘Super Flat Speculation’, p. 149. 50 Marc Steinberg, ‘Otaku Consumption, Superflat Art and the Return to Edo’, Japan Forum, 16:3 (2004), 466. 51 Azuma, ‘Super Flat Speculation’, p. 151. The iconic large round eyes in Japanese anime and manga are a legacy of US occupation after World War II, when Disney animation saturated pop culture. These eyes conform to Lorenz’s child schema and are meant to elicit empathy and caretaking. See Darling, ‘Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness’, 80. 52 Ngai, ‘The Cuteness of the Avant-​Garde’, 823. 53 Yano, Pink Globalization, p. 256. 54 Lamarre, ‘Multiplanar Image’, 136. 55 John A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 14. 56 Charbonneau, ‘Sir Thopas’, p. 149. 57 See Rhiannon Purdie, ‘The Implications of Manuscript Layout in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41:3 (2005), 263–​74; and Jessica Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas’, Chaucer Review, 47:4 (2013), 416–​38. 58 For the rarity of the graphic tail-​rhyme layout in manuscripts, see Purdie, ‘Implications of Manuscript Layout’, 268; and Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms’, 420–​1. 59 See Purdie, ‘Implications of Manuscript Layout’; and Ad Putter, ‘Adventures in the Bob-​ and-​ Wheel Tradition: Narratives and Manuscripts’, in Nicholas Perkins (ed.), Medieval Romance and Material Culture (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 147–​63. 60 E. G. Stanley, ‘The Use of Bob-​Lines in Sir Thopas’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 73:1–3 (1972), 417–​ 26; and Judith Tschann, ‘The Layout of Sir Thopas in the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd.4.24, and Cambridge Gg.4.27 Manuscripts’, Chaucer Review, 20:1 (1985), 1–​13. 61 Ad Putter, ‘Adventures in the Bob-​and-​Wheel Tradition’, p. 149. 62 Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 97.

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63 Jessica Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms’, 427. 64 Purdie, ‘Implications of Manuscript Layout’, 268. 65 Shamoon, ‘Superflat Space of Japanese Anime’, p. 94. 66 Lamarre, ‘Multiplanar Image’, 122. 67 Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance’, p. 240. 68 Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 91. 69 Helen Storm Corsa, Chaucer: Poet of Mirth and Morality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), p. 200. 70 MED, s.v. ‘priken’, 1(a) and 1(b); MED, s.v. ‘prik[e]‌’, (3). 71 Lerer, ‘The Romance of Orality’. 72 Anna Gibbs, ‘Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect’, Australian Humanities Review, 24 (2001), n.p., http://​aus​tral​ianh​uman​itie​srev​iew.org/​2001/​12/​01/​con​tagi​ous-​ feeli​ngs-​paul​ine-​han​son-​and-​the-​epide​miol​ogy-​of-​aff​ect/​. (Accessed on 1 September 2017). 73 Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 31–​2. 74 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004), p. 91. 75 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, p. 820. 76 In the Middle Ages, edible figures included ‘sweet bread –​cake or confectionary’. See Ann S. Haskell, ‘Sir Thopas: The Puppet’s Puppet’, Chaucer Review, 9:3 (1975), 254. 77 For the history of subtleties, see Ivan P. Day, Royal Sugar Sculpture: 600 Years of Splendour (Durham: The Bowes Museum, 2002); and Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985). 78 Charbonneau, ‘Sir Thopas’, p. 692. 79 Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 92; and C. David Benson, ‘Their Telling Difference’, 61–​76. 80 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, p. 66. 81 David Wallace, ‘In Flaundres’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 75–​6. 82 Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, pp. 177–​8. 83 J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 111. 84 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 1989). 85 Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8:2 (2007), 158.

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86 Shu-​Mei Shih, ‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition’, PMLA, 119:1 (2004), 22. 87 Tressie McMillan Cottom, ‘Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race’, Medium (17 March 2015). https://​med​ium.com/​mess​age/​ starbu​cks-​wants-​to-​talk-​to-​you-​about-​race-​but-​does-​it-​want-​to-​talk-​ to-​you-​about-​rac​ism-​63e13​f033​f5d. (Accessed on 1 June 2018). 88 Jamelle Bouie, Gene Demby, Aisha Harris and Tressie McMillan Cottom, ‘Being Black in Public’, Slate (19 April 2018). https://​slate. com/​news-​and-​polit​ics/​2018/​04/​a-​conve​rsat​ion-​about-​starbu​cks-​ white-​fear-​and-​being-​black-​in-​pub​lic.html. (Accessed on 1 June 2018). 89 See Jordan Peele (dir.), Get Out, Universal Pictures, 2017. 90 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), pp. 87–​99. 91 Laura Hibbard Loomis, ‘Sir Thopas’, in F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (eds), Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 486–​559. 92 See Smith on romance as a luxury good in Arts of Possession. Romance serves ‘as a luxurious object itself … a symbolic good that is part of the symbolizing repertoire of aristocratic luxury’ (p. 77). 93 Mary Carruthers, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum, 81:4 (2006), 999–​1013. 94 As Smith points out, the English word ‘home’, like the Latin domus, is ‘both a place and a mode of being’ that is ‘situated in the world’s outside’ (Arts of Possession, p. xiii). The world, in turn, ‘is configured as the microcosm of the household’ (p. 16). 95 Dale, ‘Appeal of the Cute Object’, pp. 47–​50. 96 Snediker, ‘Fuzzy Logic’, p. 290. 97 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 4. 98 Ibid., p. 5. 99 Lamarre, ‘Multiplanar Image’, 137. 100 MED, s.v. ‘won[e]‌’ n. 2, 1(a) and 1(c). 101 Craig M. Gurney, ‘Accommodating Bodies: The Organization of Corporeal Dirt in the Embodied Home’, in Linda McKie and Nick Watson (eds), Organizing Bodies: Policy, Institutions and Work (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 57. 102 Carruthers, ‘Sweetness’, 1010. 103 For comparison of the humanisation of cuteness and the dehumanisation of disgust, see Sherman and Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust’, 245–​51. 104 Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, p. 216 n.923.

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105 Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) argues that for Chaucer, shit is either an integral and healthy element or an object of mockery. 106 MED, s.v. ‘priken’, 5I, dated to 1398. Morrison notes the linkage of excrement and humiliation of chivalric heroes in medieval folklore. In the German Veilchenlegende (‘violet legend’), a knight covers the first violet of spring with his cap and leaves to announce the news. A peasant then defecates on the flower in his absence. Upon his return, the knight discovers faeces instead of flower under his cap and becomes publicly shamed. See Susan Signe Morrison, The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 47. 107 Joel Gn, ‘A Lovable Metaphor’, 50. 108 Harris, Cute, Quaint, p. 11. 109 Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucerian Representation’, in Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (eds), New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 21. 110 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 9. 111 Richard, ‘Fifteen Theses on the Cute’, p. 95. 112 Norihiro Kato, ‘From Anne Frank to Hello Kitty’, New York Times (12 March 2014), n.p. 113 Noi Sawaragi, ‘Dangerously Cute: Noi Sawagari and Fumio Nanjo Discuss Contemporary Japanese Culture’, Flash Art, 163 (1992), 75. 114 For ‘the spectral Jew’, see Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For ‘the virtual Jew’, see Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 243–​60; and for a recent assessment of medieval Jewish studies, see Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson, The Critic and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 48–​54. 115 Tomasch, ‘Virtual Jew’, p. 255. 116 Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms’, 436. 117 Claire M. Waters, ‘Makyng and Middles in Chaucer’s Poetry’, in Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (eds), Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), p. 39. 118 See, for example, Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, pp. 97–​128.

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119 Blurton and Johnson, The Critic and the Prioress. On the Prioress’s Tale as low art, see Gina A. Dominick, ‘ “Countrefete Cheere”: Kitsch, Taste, and The Prioress Tale’, Exemplaria, 31:1 (2019), 1–​21. 120 Povinelli provocatively argues for the impossibility of identity at the intersection of desire, interest and language in the new post-​truth era of late liberalism; see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘What Do White People Want?: Interest, Desire, and Affect in Late Liberalism’, e-​flux (12 January 2017). conversations.e-​flux.com/​t/​elizabeth-​a-​povinelli-​what-​ do-​white-​people-​want-​interest-​desire-​and-​affect-​in-​late-​liberalism/​ 5845. (Accessed on 1 May 2018). 121 The Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. ‘Belgium’. 122 MED, s.v. ‘maumet’, 1(a) and 2(c). See OED, s.v. ‘mammet’ for association with the prophet Mohammed. 123 Shih, ‘Global Literature’, 23. 124 Roger Dahood, ‘English Historical Narratives of Jewish Child-​ Murder, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the Date of Chaucer’s Unknown Source’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 31 (2009), 140. See also David Stocker, ‘The Shrine of Little St Hugh’, in T. A. Heslop and V. A. Sekules (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture at Lincoln Cathedral (London: British Archaeological Association, 1986), pp. 115–​16. 125 Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–​1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 84. 126 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 96. 127 Brantley, ‘Reading the Forms’, 436. 128 Kathy Lavezzo, ‘The Minster and the Privy: Rereading The Prioress’s Tale’, PMLA, 126:2 (2011), 365. 129 Povinelli, ‘What Do White People Want?’, n.p. 130 Kruger, Spectral Jews, argues that the medieval Jewish spectre is simultaneously disavowed and inherited, absent and present, and bodiless and embodied. 131 Jerome Mandel, ‘ “Jewes Werk” in Sir Thopas’, in Sheila Delany (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 65. 132 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Mille (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 137. 133 Gaylord, ‘Chaucer’s Dainty “Dogerel” ’, 83; and Waters, ‘Makyng and Middles’, p. 40. 134 Julia Boffey, ‘Verse and Worse in Middle English: Defining Doggerel’, Leeds Studies in English, 41 (2010), 39.

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135 Chaucer’s bifurcated persona, the hack and the genius, maps onto Sir Thopas and Melibee, respectively. The aesthetic and affective demands of Melibee, which are anything but cute, are beyond the scope of the present project. 136 I borrow the term ‘middle strata’ from Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Part III Racialicity

5 White dorsality

Before the face turns, therefore, I would have to see its back, the back. –​David Wills1 The humanization of the flesh is the racialization of the flesh. –​Stefano Harney and Fred Moten2

The Middle English romance the King of Tars is bookended by two faces: at the front, the white face of the Princess of Tars, ‘[a]‌s white as fether of swan’ (12) and signifying the innocence, purity and beauty of the Christian heroine, dominates the visual field of the poem; at the opposite end, the ‘swete face’ of God (1241) is evoked by the narrator in a formulaic prayer that closes the romance.3 At the level of the narrative, the romance is also bracketed by two episodes of religious violence between medieval Christians and Muslims. In the first conflict, the Sultan of Damascus defeats the King of Tars, forcing him to surrender the Princess in marriage as the condition of peace. In the second conflict, however, the Sultan, now a convert to Christianity, joins forces with the King of Tars; together, the Christians triumph over the combined armies of the Sultan’s former subjects and those of five Muslim kings. The first face activates mass religious violence disguised as sexual conquest, while the second legitimates bloodshed in the name of faith. Both the white face of the Princess and the sweet face of God stand at the crossroads of gender, colour, race, religion and thanatopolitics. If the poem were a body, it would be a chimera with two faces. As such, the centre of the Janus-​faced romance, when approached from either end (or ‘face’) of the poem, is its ‘backside’. And in

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this space of the-​centre-​as-​the-​back is a monstrous lump, ‘a rond of flesche’ (577), born of the unholy miscegenation of the Sultan and the Princess. The two faces of the King of Tars may outline the contours of a white Christian body politic, but it is the formless and inhuman lump of flesh that supports the corpus of the romance. Without the flesh, the body fails to cohere, and faces cannot hold up. In Hortense J. Spillers’s foundational study of the psychoanalytics of Black flesh under the brutal apparatuses of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, the flesh is the temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body. This body is an Enlightenment invention, a humanist body endowed with inalienable rights, signifying modernity, inherently white and male and devoid of the flesh. Yet as Spillers argues, countering the regime of the Cartesian body, ‘before the “body” there is the “flesh”, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography’.4 What Spillers both describes and critiques is the linearisation and partition of time into the before, now and after. The temporalisation is coextensive with the production of the flesh and the body, the technologisation of human materiality. The cleavage inaugurates the severance of the flesh from the body, but it also manifests as material replications. As a result, there is more ‘before’, and more ‘after’. It is the somatechnologisation (but not the creation) of space, allowing the body to occupy the position after the flesh. The cumulative effect is a serial displacement: before and before, after and after. The partition has created the space of the hold in front of and behind the flesh, the holder for and of the flesh. One could now slide X in front of the flesh. One could say, for instance, that before the flesh is the face, the lump, the idol, the fetish, prosthesis, technics, God, the Word or the hold of the slave ship. But it is never simply a question of before and after. Rather, it is about the turn of figuration triggered by the cleavage of the body and the flesh; in other words, it is about tropology. In the King of Tars, the lump is the systemic edge between the flesh and the body. I borrow the term ‘systemic edge’ from Saskia Sassen, who argues that late twentieth-​century global political economy is dominated by the logic of expulsion, and ‘the systemic edge is the site where general conditions take extreme forms precisely because

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it is the site for expulsion or incorporation’.5 What the extreme forms bring into relief is the presence of deeply embedded structural trends within the system that would otherwise remain undetectable. ‘Extreme’ aptly characterises the various modes of embodiment in the King of Tars. In fact, transitions between acute forms of flesh and body determine the expulsion from or incorporation into the body politic of particular configurations of animate matter. When the lump transforms into a fair-​skinned boy after baptism, or when the Sultan’s skin whitens after his conversion, whiteness appears to function as incontrovertible somatic proof of racial and religious identity that grants entry into medieval Latin Christendom. The systemic edge is the site of the technologisation of flesh and body, here operating through the confluence of race and religion. But while on the systemic edge, the lump could turn either way –​degenerating further into disorganised flesh, or becoming a recognisable body, for instance –​or stay perfectly still. The lump of flesh looks both backward to the mother’s face and forward to the face of God. It is the edge of the before and the after, the dorsal and the ventral, whiteness and blackness, Islam and Christianity. Racialisation is the systemic edge between the flesh and the body, an edge that might stretch, or turn, towards other edges, other faces and other institutions of violence. The logic of Christian conversion and racialisation shapes the scopic regime of the King of Tars, one that insists on seeing the lump as a faceless, formless blob before baptism and not as a human child. In the first section below, I argue that religion in the romance operates like a faulty facial recognition system, with built-​in flaws reflecting the ideological biases of its designers, that fails to recognise the round of flesh as a human body. The Sultan’s inability to see the lump as a child is a form of face blindness. The queer inhuman lump, in all its flesh, refuses the appropriating gaze of Christian biopolitics and its demand for whiteness as proof of humanity. Next, I consider racialisation and conversion as somatechnologies of the human, in which the figure of the turn enacts the interpellation of the white Christian subject. But the turn towards whiteness necessitates a backward turn to the flesh before the production of the body. This turning to the back is what David Wills calls ‘the dorsal turn’, an articulation of the human as

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the technological, and vice versa.6 The lump therefore signifies the dorsality of whiteness, the structure of the flesh behind the contours of the body. It is the public secret, whose revelation is only possible through the defacement of whiteness that has become normalised and social. I then examine the stillness of the lump, the affective state that forms the chiasmus of flesh and stone, the animate and the inanimate. If racialisation makes a dorsal turn to the flesh, it is also a technologisation of elemental stillness. In the romance, racialisation materialises as a double inscription of violence: first, the production of the flesh, and second, of the body. Both articulations leave behind hieroglyphics of brutality upon the material surface. Conversion imposes a white body upon the flesh, yet in medieval medicine, the natural colour of flesh is conceived as white. The white of the flesh thus stands before the whiteness of the racialised and baptised body. Next, I argue that as a racialising operation upon the flesh, whiteness is anti-​Blackness. The Sultan’s smashing of impotent idols is an act of self-​death. His conversion, which grants him dermal whiteness as a racial-​ religious marker, is an instance of premodern anti-​Blackness violence; that is, white conversion is Black death. Self-​destruction facilitates the Sultan’s attempt to secure whiteness as racial property via the pose of the white melancholic subject, whose condition of self-​impoverishment is indistinguishable from the act of self-​fashioning. The Princess’s claims of ownership over the baptised child and herself transform both into white commodity fetishes. The drive to fabricate and possess a white, racialised and Christian identity is the compulsion of habeas album: the production of the white melancholic body as flesh, thing and property. Finally, by refusing to touch or hold the lump before baptism, the Princess fails to have her face mirror the face of her child during a crucial stage in Winnicott’s theory of infantile development. Instead, the white face of the Princess becomes the face of death in the settler colonial fantasy that is the poem. By the end of the romance, the white face of death morphs into the sweet face of God, who oversees the killing fields strewn with the faceless lumps of the unconverted.

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The coded gaze Oliver Sacks, who brought to popular awareness many cognitive conditions that are simultaneously debilitating and fascinating –​ such as visual agnosia, of which face blindness is one type –​ observes that ‘our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and our character’; and ‘it is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death’.7 Sacks’ figuration of the face as an impressionable bodily surface, ready to be ‘stamped’ with experience and character (both figured as legible signs, as signifying texts), evokes Aristotelian faculty psychology, in which sensory perceptions get imprinted in the mind and are further processed. The face is an organic archive. But as much as the face records, signifies and identifies, it can also hide and mislead. Or, the face, as a mask, offers possibilities of different identities and meanings, alternate futurities. It is a platform, a springboard, a stage. The ‘facial turn’ in critical theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-​ first centuries has brought together semiotics, cognitive studies and affect studies. It is as much about embodiment as disembodiment. Reading faces seems analogous to reading texts, and it could be the original iteration of ‘surface reading’. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus propose in their formulation, surface means ‘what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding … A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’.8 The text is an interface. Yet reading faces, like reading texts, is not without its dangers. To read faces is to participate in the politics of recognition. The twenty-​first century is the age of biometric technology. From Facebook to Google, from police surveillance to employment video interview software, artificial intelligence records, stores and analyses human faces. As a form of biopolitical governance, facial recognition technology seeks to establish an accurate link between face image and identity, to confirm the veracity of one’s existence by connecting a set of disembodied facial features to a real, embodied person. The individual subject emerges out of image analysis from detection to recognition and identification. Facial recognition is a sophisticated system of interpreting the face image based on its presumed iconicity and indexicality. As Kelly A. Gates explains,

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‘[t]‌he aim is to use the iconicity of facial images as a means of establishing their indexicality, their definitive connection to real, embodied persons’.9 In the pursuit of indexical accuracy, and in the name of scientific objectivity, facial recognition technology disregards the affective capacities and communicative functions of the face. The face, forbidden to move its muscles and express itself, becomes a flat icon. Hence, in ID photos for the workplace, school, driving licence or the police, the subject must not smile. Stripped of interactive social contexts and affective expressions, the face functions like a fingerprint, another biometric marker. As such, the face is a visual trace in the legal and criminal archives of the state, always suspected to be guilty of transgression. Socio-​cultural contexts have always determined the design and implementation of facial recognition technology. As cultural forms, technologies ‘[embody] the hopes, dreams, desires, and especially the power relations and ideological conflicts of the societies that produce them’.10 Seeing is a cultural practice as much as it is a physiological process. A ‘scopic regime’, art historian Martin Jay argues, is a system of visual theories and practices that together organise the more or less coherent ways of seeing.11 Scopic regimes are discursive products of particular societies and cultural-​historical formations, and there is no universal or standard way of seeing faces.12 Facial recognition technology is produced by and reproduces the scopic regime that created it; it is a mirror of ideology and an agent of state apparatuses. The face becomes a privileged bearer of signs that reflects larger cultural assumptions and not merely an interiorised essence or identity of its particular owner. Facial recognition thereby operates as a system of categorisation, sorting and reconfirming facial typologies on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and other presumed markers of somatic differences.13 Studies have shown that in face-​to-​face encounters and facial identification settings, many people experience an ‘other race effect’ or an ‘own-​race bias’, in which the faces of those outside one’s primary social group –​frequently organised along racial lines –​are more difficult to recognise and distinguish.14 Such biases are built into biometric technologies. As Joy Buolamwini points out, facial recognition technology is shaped by and reinforces the priorities and prejudices of its predominantly white male designers: cameras

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that cannot discern facial features of Asians and algorithms that misidentify dark-​skinned faces as those of gorillas.15 Buolamwini terms the bias built into facial recognition technology ‘the coded gaze’.16 The built-​in errors of face recognition technology become more pronounced when the software attempts to recognise the faces of women of colour.17 In its failure, the ‘recognition’ in facial recognition registers a misrecognition, or no recognition at all. The flaws of facial recognition technology suggest that the act of reading faces is not simply about what is being read and interpreted; rather, what’s equally significant is who the reader is and how the praxis of face reading is structured and implemented. Reading faces is more than surface reading. It is also, to borrow Holly Crocker’s terminology, reading in the flesh, for ‘[t]‌o read in the flesh is to admit that surfaces have depth’.18 A face may be a surface, but it is also flesh and depth. In the act of reading, two faces meet: the text and the reader. I would further argue that reading faces, in addition to surface reading and reading in the flesh, sometimes entails reading the queer, the inhuman and the racialised. To engage the King of Tars is to read in the flesh. In the romance, the Sultan of Damascus desires to wed the Christian princess of Tars, but her father, the King of Tars, initially rejects the marriage proposal. Out of rage and humiliation, the Sultan wages war against the Tars. To prevent further violence, the Princess volunteers to marry the Sultan. But while she feigns conversion to Islam in public, she clings to her Christian faith in her heart. The Sultan, unaware of her ruse, marries and impregnates her. Soon, the Princess gives birth to a monstrous, formless lump of flesh: And when the child was ybore, Wel sori wimen were therfore,  For lim no hadde it non, Bot as a rond of flesche yschore In chaumber it lay hem bifore  Withouten blod and bon. For sorwe the levedi wald dye, For it hadde noither nose no eye  Bot lay ded as the ston. (574–​82)

Horrified, the Sultan blames the aberrant birth on the Princess’s false conversion, while she attributes its monstrosity to his Islamic

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faith. They agree to appeal to their respective gods to see which religion could bestow humanity upon the lump. The Sultan’s prayers to Muslim deities –​the medieval West misconstrued Islam as polytheistic –​are ineffectual. The Princess then commands a Christian priest to baptise the lump, during which it transforms into a fair-​ faced baby boy. Moved by the sight of the miracle, the Sultan converts to Christianity, and his skin turns from black to white. The Sultan subsequently demands that all his subjects convert or face death. Buttressed by the Christian army of the King of Tars, the Sultan triumphs in his campaign of mass conversions and genocide, as the romance comes to a sudden end. Medieval medical knowledge is rooted in Aristotelian philosophy of form and matter. The foetus is frequently depicted as a miniature adult while in the womb. See, for example, the image depicting various foetal positions in a gynaecological text on folio 197 of the manuscript British Library, MS Sloane 249. The wholeness of body is a crucial marker of the foetus’s claim to humanity. Note too the primacy of the human face to the category of the human and the privileged sense of sight. The head, on which the face is located, is the seat of human faculties that facilitate perception and cognition. But if the face signifies the human, it could also be a marker of the nonhuman and the subhuman. Deformity, misplacement or the absence of the human face signals monstrosity. Medieval monstrous beings include the blemmyes, legendary creatures with faces on their chests.19 And monsters were believed to dwell at the edge of the known world, as represented in the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi.20 The monstrous body is further associated with the demonic and the idolatrous body. In medieval visual tradition, idols and devils are sometimes rendered formless without defined articulations of their figures. For instance, on British Library, MS Harley 1527, fol. 77r, three spots where idols are supposed to be are deliberately left in an almost blank-​like rendering with tentative outlines of possible bodies. In addition to the denial of form, offensive images of devils in medieval manuscripts are sometimes rubbed out by viewers, as part of the tactile expression of affective piety.21 In the Macclesfield Psalter, for example, the devil’s face has been violently rubbed out and defaced by viewers. Similarly, in the King of Tars, the Sultan angrily smashes his impotent idols to pieces

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Figure 5.1  Foetus. British Library, MS Sloane 249, fol. 197. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Figure 5.2  Detail from the Bible moralisée. British Library, MS Harley 1527, fol. 77r. (© British Library Board. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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Figure 5.3  Detail from Fitzwilliam Museum, The Macclesfield Psalter, MS 1–​2005, fol. 140r. (© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

when they fail to transform the lump of flesh: ‘brac [break] hem [them] arm and croun [head]’ (654). The lump, Katie L. Walter observes, is ‘a gynecological aberration’.22 In Aristotelian theory of human reproduction, the father provides form (life), while the mother, matter (body). John Trevisa, in his translation of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, states that ‘the child … is as it were a gobet and a partie comyng of fader and moder’.23 The possibility of giving birth to a lump of flesh is not without precedent, real and speculative, in medieval medical discourse. The fourteenth-​century French physician Guy de Chauliac theorised the existence of mola matricis (mole of the uterus), which he defined as ‘a gobat [lump] of flesche gendred in the moder’.24 Albertus Magnus, in De animalibus, identified three types of mola: (1) an unmixed female or male sperm; (2) a mole with the appearance of a shaped human body; and (3) a mass of flesh indicative of a false pregnancy. Of the third type, the false pregnancy, Albertus notes ‘a lump of flesh [frustrum carnis] that has the shape of no animal whatever and at other times only windiness comes forth’.25 And in medieval analogues of the lump birth, the

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lump is sometimes linked to a bear cub that must be licked into shape by its mother.26 Within the reception history of the King of Tars, critics have continued to read the lump of flesh literally as a monstrous body, as a hybrid matter that results from miscegenation and as a sign of the superiority of the white Christian body. Lacking unambiguous signs of life, race and gender, the lump-​child is a formless blob that is cadaverous or inanimate; that defies categorisation or interpretation; that remains incomplete, indecipherable and unrecognisable; that stands outside of law, nature, religion or language; that signifies both marvel and deviance; and that which is insufficient of yet exceeds the human.27 Much criticism, especially on questions of race and religion in the tale, is premised on Foucauldian biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Walter, for example, deploys Roberto Esposito’s theory of biopolitics to question the binarism of legendary skin and illegible flesh in the poem, contending that the lump signifies the text’s inability to articulate and comprehend an encounter with difference.28 Rethinking racialisation in general, and whiteness in particular, I would like to shift the critical parameters of reading the King of Tars beyond the biopolitical –​that is, beyond the distinction between life and death –​to the border of life and nonlife. In other words, the critical shift is from a reading of the King of Tars as a text about biopower to that of the poem as emblematic of what Elizabeth A. Povinelli terms ‘geontopower’.29 Whereas biopower operates through the governance of life and death, geontopower, which Povinelli explicates as a neologism fusing geos (nonlife) and ontology (being), designates ‘a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife’.30 This does not mean that geontopolitics has replaced biopolitics, or that biopolitics has gone away. It has not. Rather, the governance through life and death has always depended on the governance of the lively and the inert.31 Or, as Mel Y. Chen would argue, to study the inanimate is to put pressure on the biopolitical and to undo recalcitrant binary conceptions of difference. Animacy, inclusive of diverse states of animate and inanimate objects, is ‘a specific kind of affective and material construct that is not only nonneutral in relation to

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animals, humans, and living and dead things, but is shaped by race and sexuality, mapping various biopolitical realizations of animacy’.32 While the world in the King of Tars is definitively not one of late liberalism, Povinelli’s formulation of geontopower and Chen’s theory of animacy are useful in thinking through the poem’s engagements with issues of embodiment as inflected through race, religion and gender by relieving the burden of the critical reflex to read the child as a faceless monster. That is, the child is not necessarily dead or inhuman simply because it does not display signs of normative animacy or humanity. In the tale, the wilful comparison of the lump of flesh to stone indexes not only biopower’s dependence on geontopower but also the co-​emergence of life, animacy and death with the condition of nonlife, inanimacy and stillness. Before returning to my reading of the King of Tars as a geontopolitical text, I would like to consider the flesh-​stone-​lump alongside the work of the Chicano lesbian photographer Laura Aguilar. In Grounded #111, Aguilar uses her own body as both subject and object emplaced in the desert landscape of the American Southwest. Like the lump of flesh in the King of Tars, Aguilar’s figure also appears faceless and limbless. At first glance, Aguilar’s figure lies before the boulder, like the round of flesh lying before its beholder. Stillness marks the figure and the boulder, a stillness that accentuates the resonance between the two objects and that renders the figure as inanimate as the boulder. Yet the inanimacy of the figure is more akin to stasis, or nonlife, than to death. The figure seems to mirror the boulder in the background, when in fact, the boulder and the figure mirror each other. Aguilar muddles the distinctions between background and foreground since the figure, by virtue of its backward turn, could just as well be in the background behind the boulder, if the viewer were to rotate the perspective 180 degrees. One is not more important than the other. In their analysis of the photo, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen argue that the mutual mimicry between the boulder and the figure extends beyond form, colour and texture and into elemental materiality: ‘One might frame Aguilar’s boulder mimicry as protective camouflage, or a form of reverence, or even an in/​organic identification; the same minerals occur in both bodies, after all’.33 The shared chemistry between the boulder and the figure forms the basis of a queer

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erotics between stone and flesh, the inhuman and the human. The attraction between Aguilar’s figure and the boulder is palpable, as if each would fall into and merge with the other. Amelia Jones has suggested that in Aguilar’s landscape photography, the ‘boundaries between human and nonhuman melt away’.34 In contrast, Luciano and Chen insist that the categories ‘rub on, and against, each other, generating friction and leakage’.35 The distance and separation between the figure and the boulder hold, refusing a total collapse. Through mimicry, ‘Aguilar enters the very nonhuman fold where some would place her, effectively displacing the centrality of the

Figure 5.4  Laura Aguilar, Grounded #111, 2006–​2007, Inkjet print, 17 × 20 in. (© Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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human itself’.36 It is the space of what Luciano and Chen would call queer inhumanism. Aguilar’s Grounded #111 posits the flesh before the body. The viewer literally sees the flesh of her back and not the delineating members of her full body. The delicate curvature of the hair on the flesh hints at the place of the head, yet the head does not raise itself. What results is a tension between seeing the flesh and reading the body: Aguilar’s figure is both and neither flesh nor body. The viewer’s normative gaze wishes to impose a body upon the flesh, but the flesh refuses the advances of the body. A similar tension between flesh and body marks the lump in the King of Tars. The lump may be without a face, but it is neither and both flesh and body. The reflexive presumption of the viewer’s gaze is that Aguilar’s figure, by turning its back on the viewer, is hiding something. For Luciano and Chen, the figure, by curling frontally inward, hides its arms and legs, ‘concealing sex and gender, obscuring race, and making even her status as human difficult, at first, to discern’.37 But is not concealment a speculation projected onto the image rather than what the image itself presents? Aguilar’s figure may have turned, but a turn is not concealment; the figure hides nothing. There is no secret; the unseen is not the concealed. Any presumption of concealment is attributable to the viewer’s logic of seeing. The face is still there, like the back. Aguilar’s pose is a somatechnical turn, the simultaneous production of soma and techné. The turn technologises the body, insisting on its fleshiness. What appears faceless (the back) in fact marks the place of the face. The figure’s turn away from the gaze of the viewer performs Aguilar’s refusal of the logic of the (male) gaze, the appropriation by the viewer, the demand for humanity, and the expectation that a body be recognisable and classifiable. For Spillers, the hieroglyphics of the flesh are the undecipherable markings of the violence of the Middle Passage upon Black flesh. Similarly, for Aguilar, the violence of settler colonialism also leaves hieroglyphics upon the flesh. Stefanie Snider suggests that an alternate way of seeing Aguilar’s landscape photography is ‘to liken the landscape to Aguilar’s body, rather than the other way around, which tends to dehumanize her body and unquestionably integrate it into an idealized bodily form and romanticized wilderness’.38 Aguilar’s pose in Grounded #111 effectively turns the flesh

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on her back into a hieroglyph; and by mirroring the boulder, the flesh converts the landscape into an elemental hieroglyph. In settler colonialism, what is before the body is the flesh, and what is before the flesh is the land itself. Without a face, how does facial recognition even work? ‘It is by our faces that we can be recognised as individuals’, Sacks remarks.39 In the King of Tars, the lump of flesh initially does not appear to have a face at all. In fact, it gains a face only after being baptised with holy water that grants it ‘liif and lim and fas’ (770). The poem self-​reflexively repeats the triangulation of limbs, face and life in line 795, recounting the miracle of the lump’s acquisition of ‘liif and limes and face’ after the Sultan’s conversion and the baptism of the mole. The holy trinity of life, limbs and the face replicates the logic of the Passion, as Christ nailed to the cross bears the stigmata on his limbs, gives up his human life to redeem humankind, makes possible spiritual life, and imprints his post-​Passion face on the Veronica as proof of his sacrifice. The King of Tars enacts the transition from implicit geontopower (stone) to explicit biopower (Christian baby). The face, as well as by extension life and humanity, emerges retroactively only after baptism; religious conversion by the Sultan seems to be the catalyst that facilitates the lump’s full possession of a properly legible body with a recognisable face and limbs. However, I want to resist a literal reading of the religious miracle, made possible by the fantasy of Christian romance, and insist that the lump of flesh itself is not necessarily illegible or indecipherable. Rather, the lump has been misrecognised; in other words, the lump has been denied accurate, proper recognition by its reader-​viewer. And key to the problem of recognition is the role of the face and its affiliated politics of recognition. The miracle of the lump’s animation-​resurrection-​humanisation hinges not so much on the lump’s literal facelessness as on a collective inability, or wilful refusal, to recognise its face as a face prior to baptism. Put differently, it is not that there is no gaze prior to conversion and baptism, but that it is a miscoded gaze that fails to recognise the face. Gazing as reading, as well as reading as gazing, is always there. Channelling Buolamwini’s insights, I argue that the King of Tars demands the acquisition of the ‘right’ kind of coded gaze –​ white and Christian –​that would auto-​recognise and auto-​complete the face on the lump of flesh as a face.

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Walter speculates on ‘the possibility that the formless lump at its centre is not literally a lump but rather something that cannot be made sense of –​a human child denied human status because of the exogamous nature of its conception’.40 But if, as Walter suggests, the lump is never literal and is only ever a cognitive, perceptual obstacle, then it is not the nature of the lump that is the problem but the incapacity of its parents to see it as human, and thereby possessive of a face, in the first place. The Sultan, that is, has a form of face blindness. His inability could also be understood as a faulty ‘coded gaze’ that fails to recognise a face as a face. It is an inevitable effect of the inflexible and limiting logic of a biopolitics that denies the status of the human to some bodies and not others. An alternate title to the poem might be: ‘The Man Who Mistook His Child for a Stony Lump’. By repeating the simile that the lump’s ‘flesche lay stille as ston’ (636 and 659), the poem self-​consciously collapses the difference between lump and stone yet maintains their distinctions. The baby is not so much the ‘lump-​child’, as some commentators are fond of calling it, as the ‘lump-​stone’.41 The Middle English gobet means ‘a bit of flesh’, ‘a lump, a mass’ or ‘a block stone’; the word collapses but also maintains the distinction among all three states of matter.42 The critical impulse to label the lump as a ‘child’ on the part of some critics, stemmed from a biopolitical reflex and a humanist compulsion, cannot displace the prior, originary geontopolitical assertion by the text itself that the lump is as much a piece of flesh as a piece of rock. The simultaneous slippage among and the segregation of lump, stone and child suggest that what is at stake in having the right kind of coded gaze is the contest over recognition politics and who exactly counts as a political being. As Jacques Rancière observes, ‘If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness’.43 Within the geonto-​ and bio-​political world of the poem, the Sultan’s face blindness, his refusal of recognition, has the effect of denying his child the status of a political being. Medieval natural philosophy denies stones a soul yet still describes them as if endowed with vitality and agency. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes that while medieval Christianity denied stone animacy, it nonetheless developed the idea of the ‘living stone’

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(lapides vivi), especially in analogies with figurative and literal churches. ‘Every stone desires’, Cohen provocatively suggests.44 Aguilar’s figure in Grounded #111, in this light, is a kind of desiring, living flesh-​ qua-​ stone. Medieval lapidaries assert that stones are endowed with an animating force, a notion that the Book of John Mandeville picks up in its depiction of diamonds as gendered male and female that actively reproduce: ‘They groweth togodres, the maule and the femaule. And they beth noryshed with the dew of hevene, and they engendreth comunely and bryngeth forth other smale dyamaundes, that multeplieth and groweth all yeres’.45 And as Kellie Robertson observes, ‘medieval stones were irrepressibly vital: inner “virtues” bestowed on them quasi-​animate powers of motion and action, while “mineral souls” linked them to the plants, animals, and humans further along the scala naturae, or ladder of nature’.46 The vitalism and quasi-​humanism of stones can be seen in a medieval illustration of fire rocks (lapides igniferi) on folio 147r of the Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 384/​ 604. Like Mandeville’s sexualised diamonds, the fire rocks are explicitly figured as possessive of white, gendered and human faces. In fact, they appear more flower-​like than stone-​like. The fire rocks’ enfacement visually parallels a similar textual enfacement of the round of flesh in the King of Tars. The Sultan’s failure and reluctance to see his child as animate or human are reflective of the blindness inherent in the poem’s cultural and racial logic, which has led him (and the Christian Princess) to attribute incorrectly, tendentiously and recalcitrantly any perceived sign of monstrosity to religious and therefore racial difference. Within the concatenation of fleshly difference, facial difference and racial difference, enfleshment (the lump-​stone) is not enough. Rather, it is enfacement which brings about in tandem the possibility of white en-​racement, the benchmark of the human. This is a key ontological claim of the romance. The face is not a privileged object endowed with hidden knowledge and significance, Sara Ahmed claims. Critiquing Merleau-​ Ponty’s notion that the significance of the face lies in its orientation that the gaze of the viewer must recognise up close, Ahmed contends that ‘[t]‌his model does seem to depend on the face as an object of knowledge, as something that “can” be recognized’.47 Rather than

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Figure 5.5  Fire rocks (lapides igniferi). Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 384/​604, fol. 174r. (By permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

fetishising the face as the sole container of meaning, and thereby overdetermining the significance of the face, what is equally important is the relationship between the face and the act of facing. Ahmed steps back from seeing the face purely as an object of knowledge and insists on paying equal attention to the face-​to-​face encounter as a whole, especially to the orientation of the gaze. Meaning emerges out of the mutual, oriented ‘facing’ between faces: ‘the significance of the face is not simply “in” or “on” the face, but a question of how we face the face, or how we are faced’.48 In the King of Tars, how we face the lump determines how we see the lump. The miracle in the poem hinges not so much on the lump’s literal facelessness as on a collective inability, as a form of refusal, to recognise its face as a face prior to baptism. This refusal disguised as inability is the coded gaze of Christianity. Likewise, to see Aguilar’s figure as only a round of flesh is a form of blindness. The lump of flesh in the King of Tars has turned away, refusing the gaze of its father and mother. The lump, like Aguilar’s queer inhuman body, resists the demands

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for recognition because the face is always there, indifferent to the blind algorithm of its viewer.

Dorsal defacement Faciality is not a default trope of sociality. As Deleuze speculates, ‘faces have to be made, and not all societies make faces, but some need to’.49 Some societies, it seems, make lumps before they produce faces, as is the case with the King of Tars. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the critical question is what circumstances trigger the abstract machine of facialisation.50 In the King of Tars, what triggers the making of the lump of flesh? The transformation logic in the King of Tars, through which the lump changes into a human child and the Sultan’s skin whitens, is premised on the figure of the turn. The text’s complex, interlocking series of twists and turns includes baptism, conversion, somatic transformation (such as facialisation and bodily delineation), racialisation and humanisation, all of which are technologies of interpellation and subjectivisation. These turns function as both narrative signposts and ideological anchors for the religious and racial discourse. Even the poem’s geopolitics is attuned to the ideological work performed by tropologisation. It is no accident that the King of Tars takes place primarily in Damascus, an important city in Christian mythography. This is where the paradigmatic conversion of Saul-​Paul takes place. On the road to Damascus, Saul, who has been struck blind, turns around to face the voice of God that calls out to him, converts to Christianity and changes his name to Paul. Damascus stages the scene of Paul’s religious interpellation. In the King of Tars, the Sultan of Damascus is a second Saul-​Paul, as he undergoes conversion to Christianity. Historically, Damascus was a centre of trade, religion, learning and power in the Middle Ages. Its proximity to Jerusalem made it a strategic and desirable city for both Muslims and Christians. Frankish forces failed to take the city in 1126, 1129 and 1148, and Saladin conquered it in 1154.51 Damascus is the pivot around which the tropological logic of the King of Tars turns. The specificity of Damascus stands in sharp contrast to the vagueness of Tars, the mystical Christian kingdom in the East, like the legendary Christian empire of Prester  John.

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Tars could refer to medieval Tartary, Tarsus or Thrasia.52 Within the romance, the cultural-​historical reality of Damascus renders the Muslim threat concrete in time and space, whereas the fantastical nature of Tars turns it into a universal Christian utopia, an ideal that is diffused and stands outside of history. The tropology of the King of Tars operates through both specificity and generality, turning between reality and fantasy. The various turns in the King of Tars, however, are not all forward-​facing, linear or teleological. The baptism of the lump or the conversion of the Sultan might appear as a straightforward progression from the before to the after. But conversion is never a singular event, nor is its temporality one-​directional only. As Karl F. Morrison points out, medieval Christianity does not consider conversion the same as peripeteia, a sudden turn of events or an unexpected reversal in narrative. The dominant medieval Christian paradigm conceives of conversion as ‘a gradual process of formation, rather than as an instant, irreversible event … Fear of error and apostasy among professed believers demanded relentless, life-​ long vigilance’.53 Because life in a fallen world is full of dangers and perplexities, the possibility of slipping back to the old way is real. Conversion is in fact reversible and never complete. Furthermore, a turning towards the new always involves a turning back on, or from, the old. Ryan Szpiech contends that conversion ‘is never simply the turning to one thing but also always implies a turning from another’.54 Janus-​faced, conversion is inseparable from apostasy. Szpiech further notes that the multiple temporalities of conversion are embedded ‘in the semantic range of biblical words for conversion (Heb. shuv, “to return,” and its cognates, Gk. strephō and Lat. verto, “to turn,” and their derivatives), in which every “re-​ turn to” God is simultaneously a “turn away” from sin’.55 Because conversion enacts more than one turn of the soul across time, Szpiech suggests that ‘every new convert is posited and understood in dialogue with its former self’.56 Conversion is processual and dialogic; it produces multiple versions of the self, each necessary to the existence of all the others. Put differently, there are always at least two selves in every conversion. The compulsory replication of the self in conversion drives the narrative of the King of Tars. The romance gives birth to the lump of flesh so that it could stand in

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as the former self to the newly baptised child; it marks the Sultan’s skin as ‘blac’ (793) in order to set up the somatic contrast with his whitened skin later after conversion. If the child is always a child, and the Sultan’s complexion never changes, then the romance’s production of the lump and the Sultan’s black skin is a requisite backward turn that makes possible the forward turn of conversion. The former self engendered by the backward turn is always the flesh. The backward turn to the flesh in the King of Tars is what Wills would call a ‘dorsal turn’. The notion of the turn, Wills argues, ‘implies a type of technologization’.57 In his classic study, Martin Heidegger claims that technology is commonly conceived as both ‘a means and a human activity’, which render technology simultaneously instrumental and anthropological by nature.58 Instrumentalism thereby construes technology as a tool, an object external to the human and deployed by individual subjects towards various ends. Heidegger, in his critique of the instrumentalist view of technology, postulates that the essence of technology is ‘a mode of revealing’ –​an entry to truth –​for ‘techné is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techné belongs to bringing-​forth, to poiesis’.59 However, for other theorists of technology and embodiment, especially those of gender and sexuality, Heidegger’s conception of technology as a hermeneutics of truth fails to account for the material body and ‘veils over the coindebtedness, coresponsibility, coarticulation, and movement of (un)becoming-​ with’.60 Rather than merely instrumental and external, technology is constitutive of and internal to the human. Technology, according to Bernard Stiegler, ‘is the constitution of this body qua “human” … It is not a “means” for the human but its end’.61 That is, technology is somatechnics, a term derived from the Greek soma (body) and techné (craftsmanship), which rejects and supplants the view of technology as additive to, separate from or applied to the body.62 As Nikki Sullivan explains, the enmeshment of the human and the technological is characterised by ‘a chiasmatic interdependence of soma and techné: of bodily being (or corporealities) as always already technologized and technologies (which are never simply “machinic”) as always already enfleshed’.63 Technology is not an apparatus or an extension of the human; nor is it a device of

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allegoresis decoding the truth of allegory that is the human. The becoming technological is the becoming human, and vice versa. Extending the theoretical potential of somatechnics, Wills contends that the trope of the turn, specifically the figuration of the backward turn, is paradigmatic of the essential co-​constitution and mutual bringing-​forth of human soma and techné. While the turn towards the technological is necessarily marked by (self-​)mobilisation, mechanicity and automaticity, its originary moment lies not in the mechanical realm but in the somatic, because ‘the turn is first of all an inflection, a bending, the movement of a limb that, as the Latin teaches us, is the sense of articulation’.64 Technology emerges whenever a limb bends. In fact, there is technology as soon as there are limbs capable of movements, even without actual motion. In Wills’s formulation, the turning of a human limb necessarily involves ‘a type of turning around or turning back, a turning from the back or from behind, a dorsal turn, a turning to or into dorsality’.65 The technological turn is thus a human turn, which is a dorsal turn. Wills offers two primary examples that illustrate the dorsal turn inherent in human technologisation: the upright stance and ambulation. By assuming the upright position, humans literally put their vertebrae in the back of the body, as opposed to the top of the body if they had remained quadruped. To stand upright is to turn technological, for with the upright stance humans free their hands for toolmaking. This technology of the human, which defines the human, ‘comes at the human from behind, is already at its back … in its back’.66 The upright stance makes possible walking on two feet, a complex coordination of movements in which moving forward is the result of continuous deviations and adjustments of the body: ‘the human … is with each step correcting its bearing, limping from one foot to the other, realigning its centre of gravity, compensating for the disequilibrium of each movement, as it were turning one way then the other in order to advance’.67 On the one hand, the dorsal turn for Wills is ‘a departure that is also a detour, a deviation, a divergence into difference’.68 On the other hand, deviation is intrinsic to technologisation –​be it standing upright or walking –​that allows for human cohesion and sociality. The dorsal turn is the chiasmatic always already of the flesh and of the technological, respectively. Dorsality is the technologisation of the human,

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the turning of the flesh that is not only temporal and spatial but also somatic and discursive. And if religion is a technologisation of the human, then conversion, by conjuring the former self of the new convert, performs the dorsal turn. The birth of the lump is a technological surprise in the King of Tars. The Princess’s dream does not seem to prefigure the lump-​ child, for the black hound–​white knight episode points more convincingly to the Sultan’s conversion and dermal whitening. Though the pregnant Princess ‘bad to Jhesu ful of might /​Fram schame He schulde hir schilde’ (569–​70), her sense of shame is due to her having to bear the Sultan’s child and not to her foreknowledge of the monstrosity she carries. The lump is ‘the dorsal chance … the chance of what cannot be foreseen, the surprise or accident that appears, at least, to come from behind … challenging that technocratic faith or confidence and calling into question its control’.69 The lump birth is a literal turning to the flesh; it is a deviation from the reproductive script of heteronormative marriage; and it is a dorsal turn to queer inhumanism and geontology. Likewise, the pose of refusal assumed by Aguilar’s figure in Grounded #111 is a dorsal turn. As Wills notes, ‘[i]‌f the dorsal names the unseen, that is not the same as the invisible’.70 Like the inward-​directed face of Aguilar’s figure, the face of the lump-​child, though unseen by the Sultan and the Princess, is not invisible. The Sultan hence suffers from a double blindness: his face blindness is prefigured by his earlier failure to see through the Princess’s false conversion. Face blindness is linked to faith blindness. Seeing and deciphering the lump-​child is not dissimilar to viewing the figure of the rabbit-​duck created by the psychologist Joseph Jastrow. The optical illusion is a ruse, for both the rabbit and the duck coexist in the same image. Yet the human eye reflexively grasps the one or the other, not both at the same time. The challenge is to figure out which side is dorsal and which is ventral. Where the face is begs a more important question of what a face is. The baptism of the lump is an act of enfacement, or facialisation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the face emerges at the intersection of two discursive systems: ‘Significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness,

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Figure 5.6  Joseph Jastrow, ‘Rabbit and duck optical illusion’, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter. (Public domain.)

passion, and redundancies’.71 Faciality is the white wall/​black hole system: to be a subject endowed with significance is to have a face. But faces do not come prefabricated. Rather, faces are ‘engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visagété), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole’.72 In the King of Tars, Christianity operates as an abstract machine that produces the face, the index to subjectivity and bearer of meaning. Another way to understand facialisation in the poem is through Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘face-​work’. For Goffman, the face is a social interface that does not lodge in the body. Rather, the face is ‘diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them’.73 Face-​ work is work done to save face, which is the face of the subject, in accordance with the rules of discourse. In the King of Tars, Cleophas performs face-​work when he baptises the lump and bestows a ‘fas’ (770) on him. The fleshy state of the lump signifies the murky flow

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of events out of which emerges the face of the child, after Cleophas has read properly the lump as the signifier of the child’s unbaptised self. Cleophas’s face-​work further racialises the child as white, for ‘Feirer child might non be bore’ (775), just as ‘Non feirer woman might ben’ (11) than the Princess. Whiteness, as a somatic marker of race and religious identity, effectively conjoins conversion and racialisation through the figure of the face. But facialisation, or face-​work, does not always produce faces automatically. The compulsory dorsal turn to the flesh in conversion suggests that sometimes, as in the King of Tars, face-​work produces a lump first before a face. Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari, the face is not bound to the head: ‘[I]‌f the head and its elements are facialized, the entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process’.74 Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of faciality as an attribute not exclusive to the face resonates with Levinas’s ethics of the Other, in which the face need not be human or be situated in the head. The back could also be a face: The face is thus not exclusively a human face. In Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate the story is of the families, wives, and parents of political detainees traveling to the Lubyanka in Moscow for the latest news. A line is formed at the counter, a line where one can see only the backs of others. A woman awaits her turn: ‘[She] had never thought that the human back could be so expressive, and could convey states of mind in such a penetrating way. Persons approaching the counter had a particular way of craning their neck and their back, their raised shoulders with shoulder blades like springs, which seemed to cry, sob, and scream’.75

The back is the affective face of degradation and deprivation; the back-​as-​face expresses ‘the extreme precariousness of the other’.76 Utterly defenceless, the back is a signifier of human fragility and precarity. To stab someone in the back is considered unethical and cowardly; hence, the call to ethical responsibility comes from the back and not the front. The back, as the space of dorsality, is the face of the Other. Wills notes that the view of the Other is often a view from behind, a view of the Other’s back. The Other might turn its back to reveal the face, but ‘[b]‌efore the face turns … I would have to see its back, the back; I would have to see vulnerability at its most vulnerable, in the back’.77 The formless lump of flesh

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in the King of Tars, without the delineating contours of the face, is the back of the precarious Other. Similarly, Aguilar’s figure in Grounded #111 is the Other as the back. The face and the back form a reversible chiasmus: if the dorsal turn of the face displays the back, then the dorsal turn of the back reveals the face in return. By turns, the face is the back, just as the back is the face. The Levinasian face, for Judith Butler, ‘communicates what is human, what is precarious, what is injurable’.78 The face, like the back, is the Other: ‘The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face’.79 For Levinas, the face-​to-​face encounter is the scene of interpellation of the ethical subject because the face before us is not a ‘face’ per se but the Other enfleshed. The series of face-​to-​face encounters between the Sultan and the lump, between Cleophas and the lump, and between Cleophas and the Sultan in the King of Tars are scenes of ethical revelation in which the Other, in all its vulnerability, refuses the violence of conversion and racialisation. Or, in Spillers’s terms, the back of the face is the flesh before the body. The turn to the back is a turn to the Other. More precisely, as Wills suggests, the dorsal turn is a turn ‘into the structure of otherness’.80 The back of whiteness is the Other, or the flesh. As such, the dorsal turn of whiteness in the King of Tars is a turn into the structure of the flesh: the lump before baptism and the black-​skinned Sultan before conversion. Racialisation is a turn, which is a trope, and the turning of racialisation always activates a dorsal turn to the flesh. This is why the King of Tars produces a lump before it creates a face. Racialisation involves a reflexive dorsalisation of the body, often metonymised as the face. To racialise is to turn by default to the flesh before granting a body that discourse would later elevate, diminish or take away. The dorsal turn to the flesh could manifest as part of what Alexander G. Weheliye terms ‘the cruel ruse’ of Western modernity, in which ‘subjects must be transformed into flesh before being granted the illusion of possessing a body’.81 These insubstantial subjects think they have moved from flesh to body teleologically, logically and naturally. But in reality, they remain in the flesh. In the King of Tars, racialisation takes the form of conversion that grants the convert a new race: white face, white body and white humanity. Racialisation appears self-​ mobilised, automatic

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and one-​directional. Yet it is a two-​step process: first, a dorsal turn to the flesh, followed by a ventral turn to the body. Dorsalisation situates the flesh before the body, not only in the sense of temporal retroaction but in the sense of antecedence and referentiality. Face blindness is the first cruel ruse the Princess plays on the Sultan, who thinks that the child gains a human body only after baptism. But this new body is illusory, for the child is always there. In the second ruse, the Sultan believes he now possesses a new body covered in white*ness. Yet his new body too is illusory, as no one else, other than the Princess and Cleophas, seems to register the whitening of the Sultan’s skin. Behind and before whiteness is not more whiteness, but the flesh. Instead of the face, the back. Conversion and racialisation constitute the two primary modes of interpellation in the King of Tars. In Althusser’s classic formulation, the political subject comes into being when the individual responds to the hailing by ideology –​the infamous ‘Hey, you there!’ utterance of the police –​by turning around and acknowledging both the power of the state and his subjection under the law.82 Butler recasts Althusser’s interpellation as a psychic form of power, which is ‘relentlessly marked by a figure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself’.83 The turning of the individual in response to the hailing –​a turning back (up)on the self –​is a dorsal turn. Interpellation is a technologisation of the human. For Wills, the hailing by ideology comes from behind because the individual cannot foresee the force of ideology prior to interpellation and because the law precedes the individual and inscribes them as guilty already.84 The turn to the law, Butler notes, is ‘a turn against oneself, a turning back on oneself that constitutes the movement of conscience’.85 The baptism of the lump and the Sultan enfolds racialisation into conversion. Cleophas’s naming of the lump as Jon and of the Sultan as a second Cleophas hails them as individuals. The requisite turning in response to hailing takes the form of white somatic transformation: the white face of the boy and the whitened skin of his father. Whiteness is the turn that creates the racial and religious subject. But in turning white*, the subject turns against itself; the becoming of the body is mobilised through the turning against the flesh.

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As much as the King of Tars is about enfacement, the acquisition of the human face-​skin-​body inflected through the somatechnics of whiteness and Christianity, it is also about defacement, the stripping away of artifice to reveal the truth of discursive violence and the power of state ideology. For Michael Taussig, defacement is the desecration of sacred objects that have become routinised and social.86 These are everyday objects –​be they material things or immaterial praxes –​whose ideological powers no longer draw attention to themselves, whose operations are carried out matter-​ of-​ factly and whose effects are hardly noticeable because they have been normalised and naturalised. Defacement brings out the inherent magic of the object, defamiliarises the once familiar and may startle, offend or shock. Most importantly, defacement inaugurates the drama of revelation that uncovers the secret of the object. The secret uncovered is no ordinary secret but the public secret concerning the power of the object, which everyone knows but of which no one speaks. Revising Elias Cannetti’s claim that secrecy lies at the core of power, Taussig argues it is public secrecy that supports power. The public secret is ‘that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated’.87 As a form of social knowledge, the public secret is ‘knowing what not to know’ or ‘active not-​knowing’.88 Public secrets are shared knowledge without which ‘any and all social institutions –​workplace, marketplace, state, and family –​would founder’.89 It is not so much the platitude that the true nature of the public secret is that there is no secret as the social deployment of secrecy that renders the truth of power unseen but not invisible, inarticulate but not silent. The emperor has no clothes. As Kenneth Surin explains, public secrecy results in the institutionalisation of a diffusive ‘epistemic murk’, which subsists on a ‘dialectic of concealment and revelation’.90 Defacement is a burning illumination of the truth of the public secret, ‘a funereal pyre … [on which] inner natures shall be revealed’.91 In the King of Tars, face blindness operationalises the social praxis of knowing what not to know; active not knowing becomes active not seeing. The baptism of the lump-​child may appear an act of enfacement, for the child does gain a human face and body. However, its baptism more accurately functions as a defacement of the Sultan’s face blindness and the logic of conversion, which denies the child’s humanity before baptism and suppresses truth as a public secret.

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The real public secret in the King of Tars is not the fact that the lump-​child has never been a round of flesh all along, though his (in) humanity functions as an unsurprising big reveal that anchors the narrative arc. Being perceived as flesh, the lump arrives in the tale literally and figuratively already defaced –​without a face, body or other signs of the human. The defaced state of the lump ironically operates as a revelation of the secret: that to see the child as without a face or lacking humanity is to recognise the truth of face blindness; or, a defacement of defacement. Nor is the public secret the truth that the Sultan’s skin has not literally whitened, since the Sultan’s subjects never once register his alleged dermal transformation. The public secret is also not the Sultan’s illogical interpretation of the lump as proof of the Princess’s feigned conversion. The Princess’s false conversion is not a secret in the tale because, following the logic of conversion and somatic transformation, her skin would have turned as black as that of the Sultan had she truly converted to Islam. Instead, her white face remains unchanged, a visible clue to the true conviction of her Christian faith that the Sultan should have recognised in the first place. What the Sultan enacts by pointing to the lump as evidence of her falsehood is a direct exposure, not a revelation that does justice to the truth. Moreover, the public secret is neither the impotence of Islam, whose idols fail to turn the lump into a child, nor the alleged power of Christianity to bring about conversion and racialisation. Christianity interpellates but never physically transforms the child who needs no miracle in the first place. Finally, the public secret is not religious violence, which is not a secret at all in the King of Tars. In the King of Tars, racialisation is a technologisation of the flesh that operates through the conjoining of Christianity and whiteness. The real public secret in the romance is the logistics of white racialisation that performs a dorsal turn to the flesh first before turning to the body. The romance turns to the lump of flesh, the ‘backside’ of the child, before its baptism and transformation. Similarly, the romance flags the Sultan’s skin as ‘blac’ (793) first before whitening its hue (922–​3). This dorsal turn to the flesh is also the turn of recognition politics, the interpellation of the political subject. The public secret in the King of Tars is that technologies of recognition create faces; the secret is that white dorsalisation is constitutive of and inextricable from white facialisation, for

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faciality is ideology in the flesh; and the secret is that to facialise is to create not one but two faces: the front and the back, the self and the Other, the duck and the rabbit. As Stella North observes, ‘to have a face is always to have two faces … “duplicity” is a material description as much as a psychical one; the duplicitous is that which is twice folded, two-​ply’.92 The back is as much a face as the front. As the face of the other, the back ‘cannot be read for a secret meaning, and the imperative it delivers is not immediately translatable into a prescription that might be linguistically formulated and followed’.93 The face of the Other cannot be read for a secret meaning because the secret is a public secret, which takes the guise of a ruse. Jastrow’s rabbit-​duck figures the two-​faced nature of the ruse: which side is enfaced, and which defaced? The ruse is the operative mode of recognition politics. Therefore, the coded gaze as a form of face blindness is a ruse. It is not that there is no face, but that the technology cannot recognise it. The dorsal face (the back) is unrecognisable to the system. The public secrecy of the King of Tars also indexes that of Christianity: the imposition of the body upon the flesh operates through the logic of the double mirror, which is the structure of ideology. In Althusser’s analysis, Christianity, as a religious ideology, possesses a double speculary structure, for God creates subjects who will be God’s mirrors and reflections. Althusser notes that ‘the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject [God] is speculary, i.e., a mirror-​structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning’.94 A comparable double-​mirror structure also exists in Wills’s theory of dorsality: ‘[W]‌hat is behind cannot be seen without a turning; knowing what is “in back” requires the compound artifice of a double mirror, hence an inverted narcissism’.95 What Wills means by the double mirror of dorsality, at the literal level, is two mirrors placed strategically to reflect each other so that the viewer is able to see their backside in one of them. In this instance, the mirror reflects not the face but the back. The image of the back triggers a shock of defamiliarisation. If the myth of Narcissus deploys a frontal logic, by which he falls in love with the reflection of his face and not his back, then the double mirror makes possible an inverted narcissism.

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In other words, the inverted reflection generates a dorsal narcissism: the love of the back. In the King of Tars, the lump is a double mirror that reflects not the face of the Sultan but his back. When he looks at the lump of flesh, the Sultan sees the Levinasian face of the Other, which coincides with his very self. What the Sultan sees in the lump is himself as the Other: black, Muslim, unsaved and enfleshed. If narcissism figures the Lacanian mirror phase in the psychic development of self-​consciousness, then inverted narcissism inaugurates the consciousness of the Other as the dorsal side of the self. Baptism restores the face-​ to-​ face, uninverted kind of narcissism proper. When Cleophas the priest is initially released from the Sultan’s prison, the Princess specifically instructs him to make ‘hali water’ (745) in preparation for the lump’s baptism. Later, when the Sultan gets ready to receive baptism, Cleophas ‘A wel feir fessel he gan take /​With water clere and cold, /​And halwed it for the soudan sake’ (896–​8). Holy water is pivotal to the romance’s somatechnologies of conversion and racialisation. It also plays a key role in the psychoanalytics of the poem, as the rituals of baptism recreate the pool of Narcissus. When the Christian priest Cleophas baptises the Sultan, he (re)names the hitherto nameless Sultan after himself: ‘The Cristen prest hight Cleophas; /​He cleped the soudan of Damas /​After his owhen name’ (919–​21). Interpellation of the religious subject is an act of pure narcissism: the Sultan becomes a second Cleophas. In the case of the lump, baptism is also facialisation, for when the lump ‘cristned was /​It had liif and lim and fas’ (769–​70).96 For both the lump and the Sultan, baptism enacts interpellation as a turning of the already baptised flesh: from lump to child, or from black to white. Baptism is a turn also in the figural sense of turning the lump around 180 degrees to reveal its face to the Sultan and the Princess. The turning of the lump is an act of recognition, and race-​making is as much Christian-​making as flesh-​turning. In her critique of Althusser’s paradigm of interpellation, Butler points out the tropological quandary in which the figure of the ‘turn’, as both the motion of the hailed subject during interpellation and the psychic form of power embodied by the apparatuses of state ideology, necessarily participates in the very mechanism it

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seeks to describe: ‘That this figure is itself a “turn” is, rhetorically, performatively spectacular; “turn” translates the Greek sense of “trope”. Thus the trope of the turn both indicates and exemplifies the tropological status of the gesture’.97 In other words, the trope of the turn performs the turning; or, the turning of the ‘turn’ is part and parcel of the turning of the subject. Thinking alongside Butler, I would like to suggest that a similar dynamic is at work in racialisation; that is, the trope of the dorsal turn signifies and enacts the dorsality of race, the flesh before the body. This is to suggest that the King of Tars, rather than simply gesturing towards then stepping away from the possibility that the lump is really a human child, never retreats from that reality.98 By turning dorsally to the flesh, the romance insists on the necessity of the flesh in the production of the body. The lump, as the back of the child, is there; but the face of the child is always there as well. The question is, can you see and recognise it? Romance is not the complete suspension of belief. Rather, romance derives power from its holding simultaneously reality and fantasy as commensurate modes of existence: lump/​ child, black/​white skin. The critical task is not to ask whether or not what happens in romance is real. It almost never is, and that is precisely its point as a public secret. The critical question is, why the suspension of reality at this particular moment in the narrative? Why this object or subject? The task is to track the turns in the text. Who or what has been turned and thereby technologised? In the Auchinleck manuscript, the King of Tars opens with an illumination depicting the lump of flesh episode. The left panel of the split image portrays the dark-​ skinned Sultan praying to an animal-​shaped idol, while the right panel shows him and the Princess joined in prayer before the cross. The images do not match the text, as medieval illuminators took poetic licence in their interpretation of the tale. There is no lump of flesh in the left panel, and the multiple idols mentioned in the text have been merged into a single entity. The absence of the lump signals its status as beyond figuration; it is so monstrous that it is unrepresentable. Using computer technology, Maidie Hilmo has discovered a blurry image of a white baby on the altar in the right panel, a detail not in the text.99 When viewed up close, the whitish face and body of the baby, emerging out of formlessness, are faintly perceptible. As a

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Figure 5.7  The King of Tars. The National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS. 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), fol. 7r. (By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

historical artefact, the Auchinleck manuscript is not invulnerable to the ravages of time or the wear and tear inflicted by its users. Hilmo speculates that paint has flaked away from the body of the child due to ‘tactile’ readings of the manuscript in which premodern readers touch or kiss sacred images as acts of devotion.100 The unintended effect of repeated rough handling is that the image of the baby loses formal definition and now appears more blob-​like than human-​like. Through the hapticity of history, the illuminated figure of religious-​ racial miracle becomes an amorphous lump-​stone-​child.

Before the flesh Under ideology, Althusser claims, ‘individuals are always-​already subjects’.101 Despite interpellation’s choreography of hailing by the state and the subsequent turning of the individual, subjectivisation is actually atemporal, taking place outside of time. The individual and the subject are chiasmic and mutually constitutive; or,

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they are different names for the same being under different social circumstances. If so, considering the fraught history of race, is the flesh always already the body? The Middle English lumpe denotes ‘a mass of material, usually of no special shape’, ‘a lump of clay’ or ‘a swelling, excrescence’.102 Medieval illustrations sometimes depict Adam as a lump of clay that God then forms into a man.103 As Walter has shown, medieval medicine conceives of three types of flesh in the human body.104 Lanfrank, for instance, classifies the flesh as glandelose (glandular), ‘brawny’ (muscular), and ‘symple fleisch’ that can ‘fulfille þe voide placis of smale lymes to brynge hem to a good schap’.105 Flesh organises and shapes the body; it can substitute for skin and fill up gaps in the body, thereby performing an important prosthetic function.106 And on top of the medical discourse is overlaid a gendered binarism of body and flesh, in which the body is gendered masculine, ordered, measured and associated with the soul. The flesh, in contrast, is feminine, disorganised, excessive and aligned with the material.107 However, in Christian theology, Christ’s incarnation in the flesh makes possible human salvation. The semantic and cultural range of meanings of the medieval flesh thus renders it resistant to any reductive categorisation. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, following Aristotle and the Scholastics, conceives of the flesh as primarily an instrument of touch.108 The flesh is a form of tactile experience and something that can be touched. What the flesh touches is the world that, via a dorsal turn, touches the flesh in return. The relationship between the flesh and the world is chiasmatic and reversible. As Richard Kearney explains, Merleau-​Ponty’s concept of the flesh consists of a ‘twofold ontological texture –​feeling and felt –​that provides the underlying unity between … the becoming-​body of my senses and the becoming-​world of my body’.109 In a slightly different articulation, one that resonates with that of Spillers’s, Esposito theorises that the flesh ‘precedes the body and all its successive incorporations’.110 For Merleau-​Ponty, ‘[t]‌he flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element”, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire’.111 Merleau-​ Ponty’s formulation echoes late medieval natural philosophy that draws a direct parallel between stone and humanity.

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For instance, Albertus Magnus in the Book of Minerals notes that ‘the specific form of individual stones is mortal, just like humans [mortalia sicut et homines]’.112 Late medieval materialism, Cohen notes, embraces the ‘continuity between rock and flesh’.113 Moreover, ancient and medieval humoural theory posits that geography determines the composition of the four humours, which in turn influences the living and the nonliving. ‘The flesche lay stille as ston’ (636): the poem pivots around its central trope. Stillness is the anchor and the bridge between flesh and stone. The round of flesh also ‘lay ded as the ston’ (582), but inanimacy here is an inflection of stillness, not the other way around. By characterising the lump as ‘stille as stone’, the King of Tars unsettles categorical thinking: flesh is as still –​or as (in)animate, so the logic goes –​as stone. To be ston-​stille is to come to a standstill, to be at a standpoint. Though the Middle English stille denotes the absence of sound or motion, it could also mean adverbially ‘with a low sound’ and ‘with imperceptible movement’.114 It is therefore not a matter of absence or presence, but of scale and measurement. To be ston-​stille is to mirror, according to Cohen’s view, ‘stone’s propensity for lapidary stillness and seismic slide at once … a point of stasis in a bustling world, even while remaining in forceful motion’.115 To come to a standstill is to stand at the still and yet to remain paradoxically in motion. And to stand is to adopt an upright stance, to make a dorsal turn. Aguilar’s figure in Grounded #111, by coming to a standstill and making a dorsal turn against the gaze of the viewer, is as much lying down as assuming the upright stance of refusal. Likewise, the lump of flesh lies still but also ‘stands up’ in defiance of the gaze of the Sultan and the Princess. Stillness is an upright pose of refusal. Before the flesh is stillness; more precisely, before the flesh is the shock of stillness, which is the shock of recognition. A still image, especially one on a written page, has the power to shock. Taussig, defacing the history of reading and the psychic development of the child, observes that ‘[a]‌t first the child is read to, then as it gets older come to the picture books, the captions slowly extending over the page to become a pictureless book, until that day when the child, now pretty well ensconced in reading, suddenly confronts a picture in the midst of the text, a depiction of

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the written’.116 The image is shocking because it signifies ‘both prohibition of transformation and of possibilities for transformation, whereby the facelessness of the roving imagination is brought to stillness and shock by the graven image … the dialectic at a standstill’.117 Similarly, in the King of Tars, the horror of the lump is not its flesh but its stillness: ‘The flesche lay stille as ston’ (636). The shock is not that the lump is literally a stone but that it is as still as stone. Being stone-​like, the lump triggers the affective state of astonishment, wonder and suspension. The Middle English astoned denotes the state of being ‘stupified, stunned’ and of being ‘overcome with surprise or wonder’.118 The Sultan perceives the lump as ‘that selcouthe sight’ (684); selcouthe could also mean ‘marvelous’, ‘strange’ or ‘monstrous’.119 The late fourteenth-​century Dominican friar Henry Daniel translates the Latin frustrum monstruosum as wunderlumpe. Sarah Star speculates that Daniel’s vernacular translation ‘assigns a wondrous significance to an inanimate thing … it is supernatural, capable of inspiring wonder’.120 To recognise, Wills elucidates, is ‘to be cognizant in return of’.121 Recognition implements a dorsal turn, which ‘should be understood as enacting the shock of the technological shift itself, putting us where we are henceforth and probably have always been with respect to technology, behind, turned about, late, and bewildered’.122 The shock of recognition that takes place at the sight of the lump is a revelation of the technological shift, the twinned process of racialisation and conversion, in the romance. The wunderlumpe is at a standstill, at the systemic edge between stone and flesh. Racialisation is the turning of the flesh. In the King of Tars, racialisation operates through a technologisation of the stillness of the flesh. In other words, race-​making, which is also human-​ and body-​making, takes place when stillness is ‘moved’ or becomes logistical. The turn is a disturbance of the flesh–​world chiasmus; it is a dorsal turn of the flesh to the elemental world figured as still stone, then back to the flesh. Racialisation is therefore a biopolitical somatechné of the body inextricable from the geontopolitical tropologisation of the flesh. Medieval medicine, following the Galenic tradition, conceives of the flesh as sanguine; it is initially made from the mother’s menstrual blood, then from one’s own blood. The flesh materialises as blood congeals naturally or

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artificially. Lanfrank, in his surgical treatise, notes ‘þat þe fleisch & þe fatnes is mad of menstrue blood … þe fleisch the which mater is blood, þat is aldai engendrid in us’.123 Despite the visceral details concerning all the body parts that the lump is lacking, the King of Tars offers little details on its appearance. The poem is silent, even cryptic, on the precise colour of the round of flesh. An important clue is the narrator’s observation that the lump is ‘Withouten blod’ (579). As a bloodless mass, the lump lacks the chemicals necessary to make it appear sanguine, or red. The bloodless lump of flesh therefore appears white. Henry Daniel, in his Liber Uricrisiarum, states that the natural colour of flesh is white, not red: alle þe membrys in man are qwyte be weyze of kynde, al be it so þat þe flesche is red to þe syth, notforþan þat is not hys kynde colour for it is but colour accidental þat is disparplyd be þe pores of þe flesch; for zif þe blod be wel wrongyn out, men don to þe flesch þat þei etyn, elles if it be sod it turnyth toward qwyt þat xulde ben hys .124 [all the members in man are naturally white by the ways of nature, albeit the flesh is red to the sight, that is not its natural colour for it is but accidental colour, i.e. unproperly, for it has that colour due to another cause than its nature; for it is red because of blood that is dispersed by the pores of the flesh; for if flesh be parboiled and burst open, and blood be well wrung out, as these Irish men do to the meat that they eat, else it be heated to boil as we do it, bleached, and it turns toward white that should be its natural colour.]125

Flesh only appears red because of the infusion of blood in the tissues. If we were to wring the blood out, flesh would be white. Blood, as Star argues, functions as a crucial signifier and material link among medicine, religion and literature in the King of Tars: it is ‘the nexus not only of physical and spiritual life in the poem but also of medical and religious discourse’.126 Christ bleeds on the cross as a sacrifice that makes possible human salvation, one of the  cornerstones of Christian tenets ritualised in the sacraments. The absence of blood is thus indicative of the cleavage of the spiritual and the material. In accordance with medieval medicine,

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before the flesh is blood because blood provides the material basis of the flesh. Yet once congealed, flesh without blood reverts to its natural white colour. Regarding the significance of whiteness in the King of Tars, critics have primarily focused on its religious and racial valence. For Anna Czarnowus, whiteness in the romance symbolises ‘innocence and deep spirituality [which] acquires a racial dimension’.127 In Geraldine Heng’s reading, whiteness signifies the normalcy of ‘the white racial body’ and guarantees ‘aesthetic and moral virtue, European Christian identity [and] a full membership in the human community’.128 Jamie Friedman suggests that whiteness in the narrative is ‘malleable and unstable’, reflecting the racial plasticity at play in the romance; at the same time, whiteness is ‘rigid enough’ to imagine a rigorous white Christian militancy and to effect conversion.129 And Sierra Lomuto notes that whiteness as a physical marker normalises the whiteness of Latin Christendom and the Christian body, yet whiteness does not erase or overwrite the socio-​racial formations of the Oriental Princess.130 What critics have traditionally prioritised is the whiteness of the Princess, of the baptised lump-​child and of the post-​conversion Sultan –​whiteness as a somatic marker of racial and religious identity. But there is another form of somatic whiteness at work in the King of Tars, one that has little or nothing to do with race or religion. The whiteness of the bloodless lump is the whiteness of the flesh before racialisation and conversion; it is a non-​ discursive, if not pre-​ discursive, whiteness. The lump’s whiteness is neither the whiteness of the courtly lady (the Princess) nor that of the new convert (the Sultan). In the romance, the whiteness of the bloodless lump takes the form of a public secret: the originary colour of the flesh is white. Before racialisation, before conversion and before humanisation is the white flesh. Whiteness is the dorsal side of the flesh, in the sense that white is its natural colour before the infusion of blood and after its removal. Whiteness of the flesh is the ‘before’ and the ‘after’. Racialisation as the turning of the flesh is a white dorsal turn: the white of the flesh before the whiteness of race or religion; or, the white lump before the white child. White dorsality signifies the refusal of the bloodless lump of flesh to be baptised and racialised as a white Christian body.

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That is, white dorsality is the lump’s refusal to meet the demands of recognition and to be seen as the fair-​skinned yet sanguine boy. With Henry Daniel in mind, I contend that white racialisation is the turning of the white flesh into the white* body of what Heng calls ‘race-​religion’.131 Alternatively, another way to conceptualise the distinctions of different forms of whiteness is through Kearney’s concept of carnal hermeneutics. Channelling Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmus of the flesh and the world, Kearney argues that one does not begin as an individuated body but already as an enfleshed being: ‘I do not start as an isolated body opposed to another consciousness (à la Descartes or Sartre); on the contrary, I exist in my body precisely because I am already operating within and from the flesh of the world’.132 The lump of flesh is the originary state of the flesh before the body. Face blindness is therefore a denial not only of the child’s humanity but of the flesh’s right to be; it marks the limit of biopower as the arbiter of what counts as flesh, as body and as human. If, as Spillers theorises, the flesh cannot escape concealment by discourse, then the lump-​child is the flesh defaced and unconcealed. The turn of racialisation, it turns out, is not literal but perceptual. In the end, there is no back or front, no sides, to the round of flesh. For some readers, the lump of flesh is illegible, unreadable, indecipherable and unclassifiable.133 Such pronouncements imply not that the flesh is non-​signifying but that its signifiers cannot be read or understood. Yet the flesh is not a tabula rasa but is always marked. Spillers refers to the markings of anti-​ Black violence upon the Black flesh as ‘the hieroglyphics of the flesh’ that are not without significance but whose significance cannot be grasped by discourse: ‘These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color’.134 The hieroglyphics of the flesh are pre-​ symbolic and non-​ discursive; they cannot be assimilated into discourse; and they are ‘the repository for negative affective histories that are not “recorded” in the dominant narrative or that cannot sufficiently be recorded’.135 As Michelle Ann Stephens explains, the hieroglyphics of violence ‘are not the naturalized and normalized racial fantasies and myths of modernity. Rather, from the perspective of the flesh, they are the

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non-​sense marks with no meaning or signification beyond their reality as traces of violence’.136 As inscriptions of negative affective histories, the hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish but endure, passed down from one generation to the next. The apparatuses of discursive violence in the King of Tars –​be they conversion, racialisation, humanisation or face blindness –​ produce the hieroglyphics of the flesh. The mechanism takes the form of a double discursive inscription through which discourse produces the flesh before the body. In the first articulation, a dorsal turn as defacement reveals the flesh of the Other, and this flesh bears the hieroglyph. Next, in the second articulation, a ventral turn as enfacement produces the body. At the same time, a transference takes place, as someone else, another cut of flesh, now bears the hieroglyph. In the King of Tars, both the lump-​child and the Sultan undergo a similar double inscription of discursive violence. Because of face blindness, because of the refusal to recognise the humanity of the child before baptism, the lump itself is born as the hieroglyph of violence. The lump is ‘yschore’ (577) by discourse and lacks the essential body parts that would qualify it as human; the lump is unintelligible. The whiteness of the bloodless round of flesh has been concealed by discursive shearing and rendered invisible. During baptism, shaping displaces shearing: with ‘liif and lim and fas’ (770), the child is ‘wel schapen’ (777). Whiteness becomes visible on his face, as his flesh is concealed. The child no longer bears the markings of violence, for it is his father, the Sultan, who now carries the hieroglyphics of the flesh on his black skin. An affective transference of the negative histories of violence has taken place. This is the reason that the Sultan’s blackness suddenly ‘lights up’ after the lump’s baptism. Or, as Cord Whitaker would phrase it, the Sultan’s blackness now ‘shimmers’: ‘Than cam the soudan that was blac’ (793).137 The transference of the hieroglyphics from the lump to the Sultan also serves as a second dorsal turn that inscribes the Sultan with markings of discursive violence. His blackness is his hieroglyph. And after his conversion, the Sultan, like his son, is marked by whiteness visible on his skin: ‘Al white bicom thurth Godes gras /​And clere withouten blame’ (923–​4). The hieroglyphics of violence is then transferred to the Sultan’s people. Through

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massacre and dismemberment, the dead Muslim bodies are the final bearers of the hieroglyphics of the flesh. Before racialisation is the white flesh, which is not the same as the whitened body. But in the King of Tars, before the flesh is the dream. Upon her arrival in Damascus but before her marriage to the Sultan, the Princess has a dream in which a hundred black hounds stand ready to attack her. She prays to Christ for deliverance and is not harmed by the beasts or the three devils nearby. A menacing black hound proceeds to follow the Princess, but the dream suddenly shifts to a white knight appearing before her, speaking in human voice and assuring her that God will come to her aid in times of need: Yete hir thought withouten lesing Als sche lay in hir swevening   (That selcouthe was to rede) That blac hounde hir was folweing. Thurth might of Jhesu, Heven king,  Spac to hir in manhede In white clothes als a knight, And seyd to hir, ‘Mi swete wight,  No tharf thee nothing drede Of Ternagaunt no of Mahoun. Thi Lord that suffred passioun  Schal help thee at thi nede.’ (442–​53)

The Princess glosses her dream as a prefiguration of the happy ending to come: ‘Of that swevening in slepe sche thought /​Schuld turn to gode ending’ (461–​2). However, it is difficult accept the Princess’s interpretation without reservation and impossible to map the dream convincingly onto the narrative, because what unfolds in the plot does not correspond perfectly, if at all, to what she has witnessed in her dream. On the one hand, the dream anticipates the Sultan’s conversion and whitening; the black hound is displaced by the white knight. On the other hand, the dream seems to skip the birth of the lump-​child altogether, thereby failing to prognosticate accurately. The Princess seeks to interpret her dream typologically and to analogise her dream with reality. Yet dream and reality are at best a mismatch.

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Part of the frustration is due to the difficult syntax of the poetic lines, which makes possible more than one reading of what happens in the dream episode. Does the black hound transform into the white knight, or is it simply replaced by him? Or do the two figures coexist and coalesce into each other? The difficulty lies in the transition between these two lines: ‘That blac hounde hir was folweing. /​ Thurth might of Jhesu, Heven king’ (445–​6). In the TEAMS edition, John H. Chandler places an end mark after ‘folweing’. However, F. Krause in his 1888 edition has a comma between the lines; in Judith Perryman’s 1980 edition, there is no punctuation mark at all.138 Grammatical ambiguity has generated diverse responses and sophisticated strategies to scan and gloss the hound–​knight episode in the Princess’s dream. The critical tradition divides roughly into two camps. In the first group, the black hound does not change at all and is instead replaced by Jesus as the white knight. Lisa Lampert argues that the Princess ‘is attacked by black hounds (l. 448) and is then comforted by Jesus’.139 In the second camp, the black hound transforms into the white knight.140 Whitaker has proposed a third possibility, in which the hound does not physically transform into the Christ–knight; rather, the hound switches allegiances, wears the white armour and speaks in the voice of Jesus. For Whitaker, ‘[t]‌he black hound clothed in white suggests that … one body can display the ostensibly incommensurate somatic markers of Christian and non-​Christian identity –​whiteness and blackness –​at once’.141 What Whitaker proposes is an animal-​human-​divine cross-​species assemblage, a chimera of bodies, objects, voices and colours. There is, however, another possible reading, one in which the lack of unequivocal delineation and unambiguous partition of bodies and species points to a sensuous enmeshment of the bodily, the artefactual and the elemental: the black hound–​white knight assemblage is a lump of flesh. In the Middle Ages, Christ’s incarnate flesh is sometimes figured as a knight’s armour. In Piers Plowman, for instance, Jesus jousts in Piers’s armour symbolising the human flesh.142 If the Princess’s dream predicts the lump-​child, its prefiguration is the hound–​knight amalgamation. The entire dream, in fact, is a lump, more fleshy than bodily in its figuration. The Princess’s dream can be classified as a somnium according to Macrobius’s classification and hierarchy of dreams; somnium

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is an enigmatic dream situated in between oracular dreams and nightmares. It reveals the truth to the dreamer, but its truth is couched in fiction that requires careful exegesis.143 The middleness of the somnium characterises the dream of the Princess, for it reveals some truth of her situation and a possible future, yet its precise meaning is not as clear as the Princess has hoped. The messiness and difficulty of the dream episode are the effects of figural entanglements within the hound–​knight assemblage, which are also reflected in the linguistic complexity of the poetic language itself. When the Princess awakes, ‘On hir bed sche sat naked’ (457), and ‘For dred of that, wel sore che quaked, /​For love of her swevening’ (455–​6). The Vernon manuscript makes explicit that it is the Princess’s flesh that quakes: ‘Whon þe mayde was awaked, /​Hire flesch, i-​wis, was al aquaked /​For drede of hire sweuenynge’ (427–​9).144 The flesh of the black hounds stretches out of her dream and touches the Princess. Enfleshed and lying in bed, she lingers in a zone of indistinction between dream and reality; her flesh quakes in anticipation of the stone-​stillness of the round of flesh. What demands recognition is what lies before us, and to lie before us is to be materially present. This posture demanding attention characterises the lump of flesh. Upon its birth, the lump ‘In chaumber it lay hem bifore’ (578); it ‘lay ded as the ston’ (582); ‘The flesche lay stille as ston’ (636); and, again, ‘lay the flesche stille so ston’ (659). The Middle English verb lien refers to inanimacy and stillness, even death, as in ‘to lie dead, be dead’, and ‘to be at a stand, remain inactive’.145 Yet what lies before us and commands our attention is not only the inert and the lifeless. As Wills contends, what lies before us is also the paradox of technology: ‘Only by negotiating the paradox of a technology that we produce, which therefore comes after us yet still lies before us as the unknown of pure invention, will we undo the reductive opposition, in favor of a series of operative differences, between frontal and dorsal’.146 For Wills, the dorsal turn reveals less the past as a fixed origin than glimpses of an uncertain future. Technology is paradoxical because it embodies multiple temporalities. As a frontal turn, technology operates as a sign of pure invention; but simultaneously, as a dorsal turn that looks ‘back’ from the future, it commands attention in the present as the unknown. In the King of Tars, the

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lump embodies the paradox of technology: the somatechnics of racialisation, humanisation and conversion. That is, before its baptism and physical transformation, the lump lies before us as the flesh, the unknown; but the somatechnics of race and religion wilfully bring it forth into the future as the body, the pure invention. The unknown of pure invention is the flesh before the body. Yet the flesh does not so much lie before us as be grounded, as does the figure of Aguilar’s body in Grounded #111. To lie before us is also to impose. But the imposition enacted is not of the flesh but of the body: the body imposes upon the flesh. In their explication and further theorisation of Spillers’s concept of Black flesh, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue that slavery is ‘the reduction of body to flesh, as Spillers describes it, and the imposition of body and/​in its conceptualization upon flesh, as Spillers implies … The imposition of body as/​in its conceptualization comes before and after flesh but it never comes first’.147 Conceptualisation is indistinguishable from imposition, and the body’s conception-​as-​ imposition is a response to the flesh. For Harney and Moten, the body is ‘flesh conceptualised’.148 That is, the body is flesh imposed; the body conceptualised is also what lies before us. The imposition of body takes place before the flesh, for the body prior to slavery’s violent reduction is human. Yet to come before the flesh is not to come first; there is no originary inauguration. But the imposition also happens after the flesh, in the sense that discourse tricks the supposedly liberated flesh into thinking that it has a body endowed with equal and unalienable rights and attributes. Frank B. Wilderson would call the imposition of body after flesh ‘the ruse of analogy’ that locates Blacks in a world –​modernity in the West –​ where they do not belong: ‘The ruse of analogy erroneously locates Black in the world … [it] is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-​Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society’.149 The conceptualisation of the body is therefore both a technologisation of the flesh and a ruse. In the premodern world of the King of Tars, conversion promises and imposes the body upon the flesh; the convert’s new body, such as the Sultan’s whitened skin, is flesh conceptualised. And if flesh conceptualised is the body, then stillness conceptualised is the flesh.

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In the terminology of Merleau-​Ponty, stillness conceptualised would be the flesh of the world. In the language of medieval romance, stillness conceptualised is the flesh of the stone. To be ston-​stille is to be flesh-​still. The complex and interlocking temporalities of stone, flesh and body parallel the equally intricate temporalities of conversion. As Steven F. Kruger contends, medieval conceptions of conversion deploy a variety of temporal strategies beyond a simple teleological schema rooted in the supersession of Judaism by Christianity. Kruger identifies three major modes of time in Jew-​ to-​Christian conversion narratives: the always already, in which Jewish followers of Jesus are already Christians at heart; the yet and yet and yet, in which conversion is never fully complete, and the new convert must repeat the process again and again; and the already/​not yet, which combines the first two modes and figures conversion as paradoxically something that has already taken place but is still yet to come.150 For instance, in Peter Alfonsi’s twelfth-​ century Dialogue, Peter stages an interreligious debate between his pre-​and post-​conversion selves, the Jew Moses and the Christian Peter. As Kruger notes, while in the historical world Moses has already converted and become Peter, his conversion never actually happens by the end of the narrative: ‘Already achieved, the conversion is … held in suspense, not yet susceptible to full achievement. This is the temporal mode of the already/​not yet’.151 Reaching into the past and the future, conversion ‘is a standing still or remaining in place’.152 A temporal paradox, the hybrid mode of conversion is simultaneously deferred and fulfilled, residual and anticipatory, ‘a standing still or remaining in place’.153 I would further argue that as dilation and suspension, the Janus-​faced conversion is stillness conceptualised. In the King of Tars, the conversion of the Sultan deploys the temporal mode of the already/​not yet. On the one hand, his conversion has already happened in the Princess’s dream, when she sees the displacement of the black hound by the white knight. On the other hand, his actual conversion does not take place until Cleophas performs the rituals. But even after the whitening of his skin, the Sultan’s conversion is never fully complete or adequate, and he needs to demonstrate his Christian allegiance again and again in

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the remainder of the romance. The mass conversion campaign is an imposed transference and a violent multiplication of the logic of the already/​not yet: each decapitation of a recalcitrant Muslim body re-​ enacts the Sultan’s own deficient conversion. Is the flesh always already the body? Not always, and not always already. As a powerful critique of and corrective to Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmus of the flesh and the world, Spillers’s insight that the flesh is the antecedent to the body is an excoriating revelation that for some people (Black, coloured, disabled, queer, among others), their flesh does not ever cross over or become reversible. Instead of reversibility or crossing-​over, there is only severance and the abyss. For some, accession to the body is only a ruse, and they remain in their flesh. Roland Barthes suggests that ‘the face represent[s]‌a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced’.154 The newly baptised child Jon may have a white* Christian body, yet he retains his fleshiness. His fair face is an index to the absolute state of the flesh, not its negation. The whiteness of the Christian body, rather than signifying the transmutation of the unsaved flesh into the redeemed body, figures the absolute state of the flesh that, as Henry Daniel conceives, is white. The white of the flesh stands before the whiteness of the racialised and baptised body, not vice versa. The body is the prosthesis of the flesh, not the other way around; the prosthetic does not come before the flesh. The face-​to-​face encounter, therefore, is the flesh-​to-​flesh. The stillness of the flesh, its ‘still’ attachment to the stone and the elemental world, endures in the face and the body. When the Sultan places the lump on the altar, he faces not only the idols but also the lump, the absolute state of the flesh.

Habeas album The Greek root of ‘idol’, eidolon, carries the following sequence of senses: ‘appearance, phantom, unsubstantial form, image in water or a mirror, mental image, fancy, material image or statue’.155 The idol’s affinity with the spectral, the specular and the watery renders it a kind of narcissistic mirror, like ideology. As such, the idol is not dissimilar to the Judeo-​Christian God, with its double specularity and mirror duplication. And the double-​mirror structure of idolatry

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further aligns it with the dorsal, inverting its narcissism. But in most scenes of idolatry, such as the ones depicted in the King of Tars, it is the face-​to-​face dynamic that predominates the encounters. Pleading with Muslim deities for a miracle that would transform the lump of flesh into human form, the Sultan uncannily mirrors the very idols that he prays to, and vice versa. The idols are social objects, and their ‘flesh’ parallels that of the Sultan; both share and participate in the social flesh of the world. Ostensibly, it is the lump that lies before the idols on the altar. Yet in the scene of supplication, the Sultan too, like the lump, kneels before the idols. He calls out the names of the ‘mightful Mahoun … And Ternagaunt … Seyn Jubiter and Apolin, /​Astirot and Seyn Jovin’ (625–​9), interpellating the idols as much as appealing to them.156 The idols, however, remain silent and do not turn in response to his hailing; their flesh is as dead as that of the lump before them. Placed on top of the altar at level with the Muslim gods, the lump becomes another idol.157 Frustrated by the idols’ inaction, the Sultan is defined both by his inferior faith and his incompetent flesh that fails to bestow form to his child. The Sultan, too, turns into a lump of flesh before the idols. Medieval theories of idolatry, shaped by the history of Christian iconoclasm, consider idols devoid of vitality and significance. As empty objects, idols are not part of the larger sign system of Christian semiotics. While coextensive with representation, idolatry does not signify on its own. As Nicolette Zeeman notes, the idol exists for and draws attention to itself, especially its materiality, and seeks worship for itself. Though material in constitution, the idol is paradoxically ‘nothing’ and inanimate.158 The work of human hands, the idol is by nature artificial and artefactual. For Wills, Althusser’s insight that ideology has material existence ‘conversely reinscribes a sense of materiality upon the imaginary’.159 Idolatry is the material figuration of an imaginary relation between humanity and the divine; the idol is a technological artifice. More than a religious object, the idol is also a social, somatechnical, gendered and racialised thing. However, for medieval Christians, idols are false gods. Conversion, Suzanne Conklin Akbari observes, is ‘literally … a turning away from the wrong object of worship to the right object’.160 The idols in the King of Tars are the wrong objects of faith away from which the Sultan must turn. Together

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with totems and fetishes, idols belong to what W. J. T. Mitchell terms ‘the fundamental categories of “bad objecthood” endemic to Western critiques of religion, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics, and political economy’.161 The triangulation of the Sultan, the lump and the idols creates a shared flesh among them; it also means that the Sultan, like the lump, is one bad object among others. Bad objecthood structures medieval anti-​Muslim narratives. In romance, objects –​be they magical or not –​are highly charged signifiers of ideology. All romance objects, in a sense, are discursive mirrors of society. Considering the trope of bad Muslim objecthood in the late eleventh-​century chanson de geste tradition, Akbari notes that Muslim idols frequently appear in the narrative when their impotence is exposed and offered as evidence of Islam’s falsity, for the idols’ ‘presence serves as a signal of the waning power of the Muslims, who turn upon their gods whenever they suffer a military defeat’.162 The scene of idolatry is the scene of iconoclasm; condemnation is mixed with confirmation of Muslim inferiority and Christian superiority. If idolatry is a prosthesis of faith, then the Sultan’s smashing of idols might more accurately be understood as an act of prosthe-​clasm, the wilful destruction of the complement as excess. For Mitchell, object categories, as well as the qualitative valuations attached to them, are not inflexible ‘bins’ into which objects are slotted, and the same object could belong to multiple categories depending on context and usage. Object categories are object relations: ‘totemism, fetishism, and idolatry are not to be regarded as discrete, essential categories of objects … They are rather to be understood as the names of three different relations to things, three forms of “object relations”, if you will’.163 Consequently, there are no bad objects but only faulty object relations. Instrumentalism is one type of object relation. The impotent idols in the King of Tars are like Heidegger’s broken hammer, which one notices only when it stops working properly as a hammer.164 The tool draws attention to itself as a tool when it ceases to function as one, or when the tool is ‘dead’. Prior to its breaking down, while working in accordance with its design and function, the tool had faded into the background of the everyday and was unremarkable. Extending the same logic to the King of Tars, is it possible that the

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Muslim idols did work properly before the Sultan’s marriage to the Princess and before the birth of the lump? The text is silent, but the Sultan’s initial victory over Tars and his winning of the Princess might be construed as proof of the idols’ (former) powers. In fact, it is the Princess who turns the idols into broken hammers, just as she declares her child a formless, useless piece of flesh. Her challenge to the Sultan is a self-​fulfilling prophecy because the lump has always been a child. Of course the idols are doomed to fail, for they could never fix a child who has never been damaged. By smashing the idols, the Sultan adopts an instrumentalist view of religion as a means to an end: the humanisation of his child ensures the continuity of his lineage. As Sullivan explains, an instrumentalist view of technology assumes that ‘technology is (constituted as) an object external to and manipulable by the subject(s) who deploy it to their own ends’.165 The Sultan’s act of iconoclasm affirms the instrumentalist assumptions that the idols are external, manipulable apparatuses wielded by him. However, the idols in the King of Tars are not external objects, for they share the same flesh as that of the Sultan and the lump; and the idols are not fully manipulable by the Sultan without his being fully implicated in his self-​technologisation in return. The Sultan, in smashing the idols, injures himself in the process. The Sultan’s smashing of idols fulfils yet another key function of the public secret. Taussig argues that the public secret has a multi-​ layered structure, and there is a secret within the secret. A taboo is not simply a prohibition of acts but a prohibition ‘that, illicitly … contains a hidden yearning, an appeal, even a demand, within itself to transgress that which it prohibits: this, its secret’.166 The incitement to transgression is the primordial secret within the public secret, and it structures desire as a wish to possess that which is forbidden. In the King of Tars, transgressive incitement takes the form of iconoclasm: the smashing of idols is the secret of secrets, which is already foreshadowed in the Sultan’s initial reaction to the King of Tars’s rejection of his marriage proposal: ‘His here he rent of heved and berd’ (100). The Sultan effectively turns himself into an idol that must be smashed. The incitement to transgression is also the incitement to defacement, the unmasking of the public secret. The desecration of the idol is inseparable from its creation,

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a necessary stage of its life cycle. As Aranye Fradenburg contends, ‘we make idols in part to make them tumble down. In building the object, in other words, we build a critique of its rights to power’.167 Zeeman similarly notes that brokenness is a central characteristic of medieval idols, which are always in a state of collapse or the verge of dissolution.168 Iconoclasm plays an important role in articulating the logic of enfleshment and embodiment in the King of Tars. The Sultan ‘stirt anon his godes to bete /​And drough hem alle adoun … And alder best he bete afin /​Jubiter and Paolin, /​And brac hem arm and croun’ (647–​54). The smashing of idols enacts what Micah Goodrich has identified as the trope of ‘biosalvation’ in medieval theology and literature, in which some bodies must be maimed so that the health of the body politic could be sustained. Biosalvation is ‘a technology of both harm and rehabilitation’ that ‘operates by protecting the health of the many at the expense of the few’.169 The idols must be maimed and scarified so that the lump could be saved. Armless, headless and faceless, the idols have been shorn into lumps of flesh, like the Sultan’s child.170 Now that the idols have been smashed, the lump can transform into a child. A chiasmus, or a concatenation of flesh, forms among various bad objects: idols become lumps, and the lump becomes a child. The idols must be sacrificed so the lump-​child could be reborn, a reverse sacrifice whereby the gods give up their flesh as an offering to the human. This is another public secret in the King of Tars: to make a body, you must first break a body. Or, lumpiness is the state of defacement, and the idols must be defaced so the child could be enfaced. Afterwards, the idols remain broken pieces of flesh; the child, on the other hand, has gained a white* Christian body. As the Sultan prays, the idols demand a sacrifice, which turns out to be the Sultan himself, except that he does not know it yet. Idols, totems and fetishes are ‘things that want things, that demand, desire, even require things –​food, money, blood, respect’.171 Initially, the Sultan believes that by smashing the idols to pieces, he not only concedes the impotence of his faith but also offers up the broken idols as sacrifice to the Christian God. As a sacrificial revelation of truth, defacement for Taussig is ‘[a]‌decidedly mystical process … whereby truth, as secret, is finally revealed, is hence a sacrifice, even a self-​sacrifice’.172 Defacement is the ‘cut’ that releases negation

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as a sacred surplus, ‘the cut into wholeness as holiness that, in sundering, reveals, as with film montage, not only another view via another frame, but released flows of energy’.173 Or, in Sassen’s terminology, defacement is the cut that forms the systemic edge, making visible the structural trends –​public secrets –​buttressing the social world. As the Sultan beats and maims the idols, he is also cutting himself in an act of self-​castration. The maiming of the idols is a self-​sacrifice, a self-​death (which is not the same as suicide) and a self-​technologisation of the Sultan. Ironically, the Sultan’s destruction of the idols also serves as his recognition of their power over him. If, as Taussig argues, objects on the verge of death come alive through the burst of energy they release, then what the Sultan unleashes in the maiming of the idols is his own vitality. In self-​ sacrifice, the Sultan is the most alive, for ‘image-​breaking is not a form of sacrifice but a sacrificial form of enjoyment’.174 This is the true climax for the Sultan in the King of Tars, for after the scene of iconoclasm, he is effectively dead as a subject in the remainder of the narrative. Having disavowed his old faith, the Sultan turns into a corpse; his conversion to Christianity is a funereal rite. The whiteness of his newly bleached skin is the colour of the cadaver, what the Princess misrecognises as the sign of his new identity. Being dead, the Sultan becomes an agent of death when he offers his subjects the impossible choice of conversion or execution. The idols do become more powerful and alive through their destruction, as Islam exerts an even stronger hold on the Sultan’s subjects who refuse to convert. And the idols do grant the Sultan what he wants. By abandoning his old faith and accepting the Christian logic of the Princess, the Sultan sacrifices himself in exchange for his son’s humanity. It is the Sultan’s apostasy and self-​sacrifice, not conversion, that unseal his eyes to the true humanity of his son. The Sultan’s self-​death reaches its final phase in his conversion to Christianity, whose grammar is the future perfect. As construed by the Princess, the Sultan is free to decide if he wants to convert or not. He could risk his son’s life and humanity by sticking with Muslim idols, or he could take a leap of faith in the Christian God and give his child a shot at the miracle he thinks it desperately needs. Yet free will is an illusion, for the logic of the future perfect dictates that the Sultan has never had a choice. At least for the Princess, the Sultan’s

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conversion has already taken place in her dream: the black hound transforms into, or is displaced by, the white knight speaking with the voice of Christ. She interprets her dream typologically, confident that the dream is a prefiguration of what will be fulfilled in real life.175 The Sultan’s conversion therefore assumes the temporality of ‘the already/​not yet’: it has already taken place in Lacan’s Symbolic order but is yet to come in the order of the Real. The Sultan’s conversion mirrors closely, but not perfectly, the smashing of the idols. Both rituals are acts of desecration and defacement. Both iconoclasm and conversion reconfigure the material body: the idols are maimed and reduced to inanimate flesh, and the Sultan strips naked in order to receive a whitened body. Through his renaming and baptism, the Sultan is defaced, whitened and then refaced. Chandler suggests that conversion transforms the Sultan into a son of his own son: ‘It is through the miracle of the child’s fleshy conversion that the sultan acknowledges the power of Christ, and this religious conversion could be read as a reverse-​birth, that is, the sultan is spiritually the son of his own child’.176 I would further suggest that in the romance, the Sultan is the son of his son in the material sense as well, for it is Jon who first transforms into a fair-​skinned boy; and the whiteness of the son is then passed down to the father when the Sultan’s skin whitens later. However, the Sultan’s corporeal metamorphosis is not the inevitable by-​product of his baptism. As Whitaker observes, the Sultan’s skin whitens immediately after Cleophas renames him but before the ritual of baptism.177 Cleophas ‘cleped the soudan of Damas /​ After his owhen name. /​His hide that blac and lothely was /​Al white bicom thurth Godes gras /​And clere withouten blame’ (920–​ 4). The ruse has been exposed: there is no magic in the holy water. The real magic lies in interpellation, in renaming as self-​naming and in narcissistic mirroring. It is not holy water that whitens black skin but theocratic ideology. Whiteness, as the colour of cadaver, marks the death of the Sultan’s living Blackness. The Sultan’s conversion, coded as Black death, is an act of anti-​Black violence that cannot be analogised. As Wilderson contends, the reflexive desire of the West to render anti-​Black violence comparable to the degradation and suffering of other persecuted minoritarian groups in history is a ruse of analogy. It is an intellectual shorthand to silo,

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dismiss and explain away anti-​Black violence. But ‘the violence that continually repositions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analogue in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive’.178 The impossibility of analogy stems from the brutal exclusion of Blacks from full humanity. In the King of Tars, the conversion of the Sultan is an act of violence against Black flesh. This is not to suggest that premodern Muslims in the Levant –​pejoratively labelled ‘Saracens’ by the medieval West –​are the same as sub-​Saharan Africans or the peoples of the Black Diaspora in early modernity, modernity and postmodernity.179 However, I would argue that the King of Tars, in its figuration of Muslims as black hounds, and in its identification of the Sultan’s skin tone as ‘blac’ (793 and 922), engages in acts of violence against the religious and racial Other that would later be termed ‘anti-​Blackness’. The tactics and rhetorics are different from their modern counterparts, but the shared brutality against Blackness cannot be dismissed. The violence inflicted upon the Sultan shatters his Muslim identity and body. As an instance of anti-​Black violence, the conversion of the Sultan cannot be analogised with the baptism and transformation of the lump, for the round of flesh is never figured as Black flesh in the romance. Whiteness is a luxury colour that few in the King of Tars could afford to see, let alone possess. With the exception of the Princess and Cleophas, no one else seems to register the Sultan’s newly whitened skin. Some kind of somatic blindness is happening once again: whereas earlier, the Sultan and the Princess alone suffer from face blindness, now the entire city of Damascus is afflicted with white* blindness. When Cleophas reports the news of the Princess to the King of Tars, he mentions not the Sultan’s whitening but only his conversion: ‘And hou that hethen soudan /​Was bicome a Cristen man /​Thurth the might of Heven king’ (976–​8). When the King of Tars meets up with the new convert, the ‘cristen soudan’ (1099), he seems indifferent to the Sultan’s outer appearance. The Princess, Cleophas and the Sultan himself are the only ones who could see his changed complexion. Now the Sultan’s whitened skin, like the lump of flesh earlier, functions as the public secret in the romance. Active not knowing shifts to active not seeing; or, active not knowing means knowing who else is in the know. No one else

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sees the white skin because to recognise the Sultan’s whitening is to fall prey to the ruse of racialisation and conversion, a sort of white magic. As for the Sultan’s subjects, why should they care if the Sultan’s skin had changed its colour or not? All they could see is the violence of conversion, the dispossession of the body and the defacement of the flesh. The mass conversions at the end of the tale are noticeable for what remains unchanged and what cannot be confirmed. Oddly, the new converts do not change their skin tone, and there is no way to verify the intentionality and sincerity of their conversion. The Sultan’s experience remains a singular exception. The Princess’s reaction to the Sultan right after his conversion is a series of sudden turns, affectations and performatives. At first, she does not recognise the whitened Sultan, though she offers thanks to God and weeps for joy: ‘The levedi thonked God that day; /​For joie sche wepe with eyghen gray, /​Unnethe hir lord sche knewe’ (934–​ 6). Perhaps her initial praise to God is an automatic response not to the Sultan as a person but to his earlier words proclaiming the Christian God as true: ‘ “Lo, dame,” he gan to say, /​“Certeyne, thi God is trewe” ’ (932–​3). Next, she reads his changed complexion as incontrovertible proof of his change of faith: ‘Than wist sche wele in hir thought /​That on Mahoun leved he nought /​For chaunged was his hewe’ (937–​9). Finally, with her doubts cleared, she banishes her woe and renews her joy: ‘For that hir lord was cristned so, /​Oway was went al hir wo –​/​Hir joie gan wax al newe’ (940–​ 2). The rapid shifts from uncertain recognition to no recognition then firm recognition, from joy to woe then back to joy, mark her reception of the newly converted Sultan as ambivalent, paradoxical and unstable. There is a moment of indecision and confusion, of multiple possibilities, of not knowing but knowing the enfleshed body in front of her. However brief it might be, the moment is a standstill. The two flashes of joy (935 and 942) at the beginning and the end of the episode frame the momentary standstill as a scene of double (un)recognition. The Princess enacts the paradox of recognition, the already/​not yet: she already recognises the Sultan as a Muslim spouse but does not quite recognise the Sultan as a Christian. This is the moment of just revelation in the King of Tars. Truth brought forth by defacement, in Taussig’s further elaboration of Benjamin’s insight, ‘is not a matter of exposure which

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destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it’.180 The just revelation is a burning illumination that unleashes the truth’s energy, magic and secret. In the King of Tars, the Sultan’s smashing of idols, the lump’s transformation and the Sultan’s whitening are not moments of just revelation because no justice has been done to the truth of the violent apparatuses of Christianity, its imposition of blindness and its brutal dispossession of the flesh. Rather, the Princess’s moment of double (un)recognition (the already/​not yet) is the moment of just revelation, for it is then that the Princess is finally defaced, and the ruse exposed. Her affective releases of joy and woe index the conflicting demands of conversion, and she is caught in the illogic of Christian tropology. If, as Morrison points out, true conversion is the conversion of the heart, does it really matter at all if the Sultan’s skin has whitened? Has she not known her husband all along? The Princess needs the Sultan’s skin tone to match hers in order to initiate the project of mass conversion in Damascus. But in her moment of uncertainty, she seems surprised by the very thing she has desired. The scene registers the shock of recognition: not of the true identity of the Sultan, but of the depth of anti-​Black violence that leaves its marks on the flesh, for whiteness is but another hieroglyphic of violence. In her briefest of hesitations, the Princess defaces herself. The Princess’s double-​take also exposes the cunning of recognition: its operation and brutality. The politics of recognition in late liberalism, Povinelli contends, is rooted in the Enlightenment’s twinned deployments of reason as a mode of cunning and as an instrument of violence. Critiquing Hegel’s account of reason in The Philosophy of History, Povinelli claims that ‘[i]‌n Hegel’s hands the cunning of reason was revealed at the same time its brutality was exposed’.181 Likewise, the double exposure of cunning and violence –​as defacement, as revelation –​takes place in the politics of recognition. By the cunning of recognition, Povinelli means the re-​inscription of the status quo in official recognition of oppressed minoritarians, the futile gestures of recognition that do not challenge the system, trigger painful shame in well-​ intentioned liberals or redistribute their resources. In other words, it is a vapid and painless recognition that leads to nowhere, an articulation of white fragility. Povinelli poignantly asks: ‘We need to puzzle over a simple question: What is

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the nation recognizing, capital commodifying, and the court trying to save from the breach of history when difference is recognized?’182 Or, as Saidiya Hartman questions: ‘[S]uppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather intensifying it?’183 A similar intertwinement of recognition’s cunning and violence is operative in the King of Tars. The Princess’s recognition of the Sultan’s conversion is the result of sly manoeuvres of affects and signifiers, which recognise not simply the act of conversion of the Sultan but the violence inflicted on him in the form of whitened skin, a violence that would soon spread to all the Muslims in Damascus. Moreover, the cunning of recognition also operates through the future perfect of stranger danger in the romance. The stranger is not someone we do not recognise; instead, as Ahmed suggests, ‘the stranger is some-​body whom we have already recognised in the very moment in which they are “seen” or “faced” as a stranger. The figure of the stranger is far from simply being strange; it is a figure that is painfully familiar in that very strange(r)ness’.184 An uncanny reversal of Ahmed’s theory of the stranger takes place in the Princess’s response to the Sultan’s conversion. The whitened Sultan is not the ‘strange-​as-​already-​familiar’ but the ‘familiar-​as-​already-​ strange’. In the post-​conversion encounter between the Sultan and the Princess, the familiar (husband) is literally the stranger whom the Princess fails to recognise, at least at first. The Sultan is the-​ already-​strange and the-​not-​yet-​familiar. Lastly, for Povinelli, the cunning of late liberal recognition lies in its ‘intercalation of the politics of culture with the culture of capital’.185 That is, capital in the guise of culture is inserted into and thereby transforms the politics of culture. The King of Tars enacts a different set of intercalations in premodernity: the intercalation of the social conceptualisation of the flesh with the somatechnologisation of the body, of religion with race, of ventrality with dorsality and of public secrecy with recognition politics. Actually, the whitening of the Sultan takes place much earlier in the poem, before his conversion and before the lump’s baptism. It occurs when the Sultan adopts the pose of what Arthur L. Little terms ‘the white melancholic subject’ in the face of a round of the flesh that lies before him.186 His reaction to the lump-​child is not

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horror or fear but sorrow and grief. He blames the Princess how ‘wo was hir bigon’ (585) and how it is no wonder that the idols have made him ‘greve’ (597). The Sultan’s affective response to the lump is unmistakably melancholic. Racial melancholia, in Anne Anlin Cheng’s formulation, is ‘the melancholic introjection of racial others’ into white identity and authority which whiteness ‘can neither fully relinquish nor accommodate’.187 Through mechanisms of exclusion, racial melancholia constitutes, defines and haunts whiteness and its racial others. Extending Cheng’s thesis, Little contends that white melancholia, as a premodern iteration of racial melancholia, emerged in early modernity in tandem with capitalism and humanism. Key to the formation of white melancholia is the concept of property, by which Little means both quality and possession. The early modern period witnessed ‘the more articulated, if uneven, transformation of whiteness into a racial property of those whom we would later more formally reference as white people’.188 But early modern whiteness as racial property is paradoxically figured yet unmarked, therefore presumed, naturalised and universalised; whiteness is thus ‘a property that’s at once immanent, intimate, and out of reach’.189 And because it is out of reach, whiteness is the perpetual state of melancholic impoverishment. To be a white melancholic subject –​say, Hamlet, whom Little cites –​is to inhabit the condition of self-​impoverishment that is at the same time the act of self-​fashioning. But this self-​fashioning is not of the racial Other but ‘the self-​fashioning of the self … It’s white people –​the whiteness of white people –​who are being fashioned. It’s modernity as melancholia’.190 In short, the white melancholic subject is white, human and modern. I suspect that the white melancholic subject appeared much earlier than Hamlet in the West. In the King of Tars, for instance, the Sultan may have started out as ‘a blac hounde’ (445) of Islam. But by the time he responds to the lump of flesh with woes and grief, he has already turned himself into a white melancholic subject actively engaged in self-​fashioning. It might appear that the Sultan is attempting to generate and bestow a form on his child; however, he is in fact initiating a self-​fashioning that would culminate in his conversion and transformation. The Sultan never refers to the lump-​ child as a dead object, only as a lost child: ‘Therefore is lorn this

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litel faunt’ (596), he laments. It is the narrator and Cleophas who explicitly pronounce the lump as ‘dead’ on arrival: the lump ‘lay ded as the stone’ (582), the narrator notes; and Cleophas recounts to the King of Tars how ‘the child ded born was’ (971). The lump, to the Sultan, is first and foremost a lost thing. By treating the lump as loss, the Sultan turns it into property and claims ownership over it. Harney and Moten, in their provocative retelling of the historical co-​emergence of capitalism and logistics, suggest that ‘all property is posited, beginning with the positing/​positioning of a body for locating ownership … The posit and the deposit inaugurate ownership as incorporation, whose inevitable end, given in continual withdrawal, is loss. This requires the production of a science of loss, which is to say the science of whiteness, or, logistics’.191 Whiteness as the science of loss prevention, according to Harney and Moten, refers to the history of racial capitalism in which whiteness coalesces around property ownership, the human body and individuated subjecthood, whereas Blackness hardens into undifferentiated objecthood, the inhuman flesh and dispossessed chattels. The lump-​child’s first entry into whiteness, it turns out, is not his baptism but the Sultan’s oblique conversion of him into a thing lost. The lump is coded, if not implicitly racialised, as white property. Cheryl Harris has argued that whiteness in the US began as a marker of racial identity but evolved into a form of property in the late nineteenth century.192 Whiteness ‘meets the functional criteria of property. Specifically, the law has accorded “holders” of whiteness the same privileges and benefits accorded holders of other types of property’.193 While Little has pushed the historical emergence of whiteness as property back to the early modern, I would argue that medieval romance, such as the King of Tars, already exhibits premodern stirrings, if not exact counterparts, that would resonate with the institutionalisation and ideological elaboration of whiteness as property in later phases of modernity. Not to be outdone by the Sultan, the Princess takes a step further by making more explicit the proprietary nature of their child over whose ownership they would contest. Before the lump transforms into a child, the Princess insists that the responsibility for the monstrous birth be shared equally between her and her husband. Countering the Sultan’s accusation that she alone has brought

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forth the inhuman lump of flesh, the Princess forcefully reminds him: ‘Leve sir, lat be that thought; /​The child was geten bitwen ous to’ (600–​1). But the instant the lump transforms into a fair child, the Princess invokes the logic of white property. According to her reasoning, the Sultan cannot claim even half of the child because God has replaced him as the child’s true father by humanising the lump. She mocks the Sultan’s naivety: ‘Ya, sir, bi Seyn Martin /​Yif the halvendel wer thin /​Wel glad might thou be’ (802–​4). Worse, the Sultan has lost not only a son but also his wife, for she now rejects his claim over her unless he converts: ‘Bot thou were cristned so it is —​/​Thou no hast no part theron ywis, /​Noither of the child ne of me’ (808–​10). The Princess’s bold assertions rest on an understanding of whiteness as both racial identity and property. In this instance, whiteness is visibly matrilineal, for the Princess insists she has unambiguously passed it down to the child by way of baptism. The face of the child mirrors her face. Whiteness has created a new family unit that does not include the black-​skinned Muslim father. And whiteness makes possible the Princess’s two acts of possession, for she claims both self-​possession and possession of her child. ‘Our lump, but my child’, she taunts him. Under religious racial capitalism, the Princess turns herself and the child into commodity fetishes. The urgency and speed with which the Princess claims the child and herself as possessions reflect late medieval legal codes regulating marriage, reproduction, property rights and inheritance. The law distinguishes different types of birth ranging from the monstrous to the illegitimate and the legitimate. Eliza Buhrer has shown that references to the monstrous in medieval law do not so much reflect any literal belief in the existence of monsters as indicate the social need to establish unequivocally the precise legal relationships –​those between spouses and between the child and the parents –​that are created, or not, when a child is born.194 As Buhrer points out, ‘the birth of a legitimate child, who lived long enough to utter a cry heard within four walls, was necessary to establish several different legal relationships between spouses, the most important of which was their right to inherit each other’s property’.195 Inheritance right is the reason that the Princess initially refuses to grant the lump-​child legitimacy or humanity, for

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recognising the child as human would have allowed the Sultan to inherit her property; it also explains the urgency with which she claims the baptised child when he ‘crid with gret deray’ (771). She must act fast to prevent the Sultan from laying claim on him first. On the divergence of the flesh and the body, Weheliye poignantly notes that ‘[i]‌f the body represents legal personhood qua self-​possession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of depravation and deprivation’.196 The flesh, severed from the body, ‘resists the legal idiom of personhood as property’.197 The originary white flesh of the bloodless lump-​child is not white property. Yet the Princess is determined to convert white flesh into white property at all costs. I call the indefatigable drive to fabricate and possess white property –​as a racialised and Christianised identity –​the compulsion of habeas album: the production of the white melancholic body as flesh, thing and property. Here, album is the fair boy or the whitened Sultan. But white* property signals bad object relation; white property is white idolatry. By casting the Sultan out of the white Christian family unit after the baptism of the lump-​ child, the Princess denies him heteronormative paternity and strips him of sexuality. The Princess queers the Sultan, turning him into Black queer flesh, since his skin tone is already explicitly coded as ‘blac’ (793) by this point in the narrative.198 When the Sultan converts, he is not only whitened but also ‘straightened’, regaining his sexuality and fatherhood as the Princess welcomes him back to the family. The strange queer turn within racialisation and conversion is a surprise dorsal turn that exposes the incoherence of Christian reproductive logic. On the surface, the King of Tars appears to follow the script of linear reproduction. But the temporal mode of the poem is the future perfect –​the already/​not yet –​in which what will have happened has already happened. The Sultan promises the Princess that he will smash the idols (826–​8), even though he has already done so earlier (646–​57). The arc of the lump-​child in the romance hews closely to the temporality of the future perfect: he will become a fair child because, well, he has always been one. The future perfect is the temporality of habeas album: the white* body-​property will be produced because it has already been fabricated. Whiteness steps outside of time and assumes an eternal body. But white flesh

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is not white body or property. The fantasy of habeas album, the incorruptible white body, is a technological artifice born of anti-​ Blackness violence.

A mother’s face Before the mirror is the mother’s face. Revising Lacan’s theory of the developmental stages of consciousness, D. W. Winnicott postulates that prior to the mirror phase, in which the infant’s recognition of their own face in the mirror inaugurates the individual subject, it is the mother’s face that the infant sees before them. Winnicott argues that ‘[i]‌n individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face’.199 In the early stages of the infant’s psychic development, the infant perceives no separation between the self and environment. The mother, though distinct from the infant and part of the external environment, is nonetheless construed by the infant as indistinguishable from their own body. Gradually, the cleavage of the ‘not-​me’ and the ‘me’ takes place, and the shift in the infant’s understanding of the mother from ‘me’ to ‘not-​me’ plays a key role in the delineation of the infant’s internal and external worlds. The environment emerges out of the previously murky yet seamless nexus of perception and apperception. For Winnicott, the environment serves three important functions in helping usher in and maintain a smooth partitioning of the infant’s sense of the self and the non-​self: holding, handling and object-​ presenting, by which Winnicott means the mirroring of the infant’s own face.200 Holding and handling her child, the mother is simultaneously object-​presenting the infant’s face back to the infant; in essence, she becomes a mirror. The successful emotional development of the infant, what Winnicott alternatively calls ‘a historical process’, depends on their being seen by the mother. Once the infant is certain of their own reflection on the mother’s face, they recognise their own existence and could thereby safely expand their gaze beyond the mother to the world at large. The shaping of the infant’s subjective ‘I’ unfolds as follows: ‘When I look I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see. I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive. In fact I take care not to see what is not there to be seen’.201

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Uncannily, Winnicott’s observation that the infant avoids seeing what is not meant to be seen is another way of articulating Taussig’s notion of the public secret. To become conscious, to become a subject, is to learn about the secrets that hold the social world together; it is active not knowing as active not seeing. But before knowing how and what not to see in their social environment, the infant must first see themselves in the mother’s face, and subsequently in a physical mirror. The mother’s face is the first mirror that responds to the baby’s face and allows for apperception to take place. In the visual traffic between the mother and the baby, ‘the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there’, which is the baby’s face.202 It is not enough that the baby sees the mother’s face, for the mother has ‘[the] role of giving back to the baby the baby’s own self’.203 Her face functions as a techné, ‘the dynamic means in and through which corporealities are crafted: that is, continuously engendered in relation to others and to a world’.204 As the child matures, ‘identifications multiply, [and] the child becomes less and less dependent on getting back the self from the mother’s and the father’s face’.205 Secured in their subjecthood, the child no longer needs the mother’s face to serve as their proxy mirror. The King of Tars opens with the Princess’s beautiful white face, a face that the Sultan, upon hearing of her beauty and reputation, demands to see and possess. When he learns of the Sultan’s intentions, the King of Tars explains to his daughter the Sultan’s desire in strictly facial terms: ‘Doughter, the soudan of Damas /​ Yernes for to se thi fas’ (52–​3). The face of the Princess is not unlike the face of Greta Garbo on the cinematic screen, which Barthes describes as ‘an admirable face-​ object’.206 As an aesthetic face-​ object, the Princess’s countenance demands to be seen and insists on a face-​to-​face encounter, which she gets when forced to marry the Sultan. However, the function of her face changes radically when the lump-​child is born. For the lump, there is no mother’s face into which it could look, or one that would give back its sense of the self. In fact, the lump never sees the Princess’s face in a maternal embrace. Barthes suggests that Garbo’s face ‘gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition’, and this is precisely the sense of danger imbued in the lump’s passive interactions with the Princess.207 She

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emphatically refuses to hold or look directly at the lump until it has been baptised and transforms into a fair child. Her refusal to touch the lump is a form of somatechnical discipline, for she in effect declares it untouchable and unworthy of a mother’s face. Ironically, it is the father’s face that the lump sees first, as the Sultan holds the lump, brings it before the idols, and looks into it. Later, the lump is passed onto Cleophas, owner of another masculine face. All of the lump’s initial face-​to-​face interactions are thus coded as paternal. The Princess, through her withdrawal of haptic contact with the child, demands that the lump be made ready for her white, Christian touch, and Cleophas must shape it into a child first. Only then would she hold and craft properly the fair boy. The Princess’s refusal to touch the lump echoes her refusal to kiss the Sultan. When she arrives in Damascus, the Sultan ‘kist her wel mani a sithe’ (376). Later, while feigning conversion to Islam, the Princess ‘kist Mahoun and Apolin, /​Astirot and Sir Jovn’ (496–​7); she literally gives lip service to the idols. But the Princess, though a recipient of the Sultan’s physical advances, never actively touches or kisses him in the narrative. After Cleophas baptises the lump, the Princess acts quickly to make sure that she is the first to touch and hold the transformed child: ‘The child sche take to hir blive /​And thonked our levedi with joies five /​The feir grace ther was bifalle’ (784–​6). Now it is the Sultan who is denied the privilege of holding or touching his son, unless he converts. Though Winnicott eschews evaluative terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the distinctions he makes between a mother’s face that operates properly and one that fails to support the infant’s psychic development point to diverging qualitative assessments of parenting choices and their effects. In her inability to function properly as a facial mirror that gives back her child his sense of the self, the Princess becomes a fairy-​tale bad mother. If the lump is a double mirror for the Sultan, it is also one for the Princess, the mother. In failing to hold and mirror the lump, the Princess ceases to have a face. As reflected in the lump-​double-​mirror, she is defined entirely by her back, as pure dorsality. But the Princess’s back is different from that of the Sultan’s. While the Sultan’s back affirms the presence of his Black Muslim flesh, that of the Princess’s signifies negatively by what it is not: her dorsal side marks the absence of a mother’s

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face. In Winnicott’s analysis, the bad mother’s face reflects only her own mood and the rigidity of her defence mechanisms against a harsh world. The infant does not see themself in her face. The consequences could be dire, Winnicott warns, as the baby’s creative capacity begins to atrophy, as the baby settles on the conviction that the mother’s face is not a mirror, as perception takes over and eliminates apperception, as self-​enrichment and discovery cease, and as the two-​way exchange with the world becomes impossible. Instead of looking at the mother’s face, the baby now studies it in order to anticipate her moods out of a desire to survive. The baby withdraws from their self and the world.208 The face of the Princess is a bad object, in Mitchell’s sense of bad objects as figures of bad object relations. For the withdrawn infant, they ‘will grow up puzzled about mirrors and what the mirror has to offer. If the mother’s face is unresponsive, then a mirror is a thing to be looked at but not to be looked into’.209 The Princess is not interested in mirroring her child’s face but in affixing meaning to it. In other words, she reads and interprets faces as signifiers. Christian didacticism runs through the entire poem, as the Princess turns every volatile incident into a teaching moment. She is the first to see then gloss the newborn child as a lump, a reading that the Sultan then proceeds to replicate; the first to see and hold the newly baptised son; and the first to see and recognise the Sultan after his conversion and whitening. Twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century studies in neuroscience have revealed that while the trope of reading faces is not entirely wrong, the act of perceiving and decoding faces is more akin to mirroring than to reading. In face-​ to-​face encounters, humans study one another’s faces and try to decipher their intentions, as the mirror neurons in the brain become activated. In mirroring the Other’s facial features and expressions, we seek to enter into empathy with the Other. When mutual mirroring occurs, social interactions could proceed smoothly. Mirroring is a more deeply rooted and primal neurological system than cognitive, linguistic processing.210 Put differently, mirroring is the dorsal turn of reading. The Princess cannot touch her son before his baptism because she is incapable of mirroring his face and entering into empathy with a being undefined by colour, religion and race. The child appears as a deviant lump of flesh because,

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without the Christian markers of humanity, he is unrecognisable to the Princess. Monstrosity is the absence of empathy and the incapacity for mirroring. As a reader of bodily and cultural signs, the Princess dictates the terms and sequence of their asymmetrical recognition and signification: first the lump-​child, then the Sultan, and later all the Muslims of Damascus. Those in power, Patchen Markell suggests, typically ‘set the terms under which any exchange of recognition with less powerful and more vulnerable others will occur, making their own desires and needs into nonnegotiable items’.211 For the Princess, her terms of recognition –​the acknowledgement of select human beings as worthy of living –​are nonnegotiable. The King of Tars is a settler colonial fantasy; the Princess’s white face is the face of death. After the Sultan’s conversion, she urges him to reach out to her father and seek his military support in the impending campaign of compulsory mass conversion in Damascus. In fact, the Princess is the first to utter the new theocratic decree, ‘convert or die’: ‘And he that wil be cristned nought, /​Loke to the deth that he be brought, /​Withouten ani duelleing’ (952–​4). The romance equates land with its people; the conversion of Muslims is figured as the conversion of their land, the resignification of Damascus. The Princess instructs the Sultan: ‘Do cristen thi lond alle and some, /​Both elde and ying’ (950–​1); and in his letter to the King of Tars the Sultan promises that ‘He will do cristen alle his lond’ (998). She may have started out as a powerless victim of patriarchy at the beginning of the poem, but the Princess ends up being the agent of death. Like the lump-​child and the Sultan, she too has been ‘turned’ by the racial logic of Christianity. And while her maternal flesh lends her a certain ‘radical indeterminacy’ vis-​à-​vis the male symbolic body politic, as Jane Gilbert puts it, the Princess is instrumental to the establishment of Christian thanatopolitics in the King of Tars.212 It is important not to romanticise or empathise with the Princess; not to elevate her white woman victimhood, which is a form of white racialism; and not to erase or excuse her complicity, agency and actions. As the King of Tars nears its end, the white face of death shifts suddenly from the Princess to the Christian God. The romance offers the ‘swete face’ of God (1241) as the final image, evoking St. Paul’s famous words in 1 Corinthian 13:12 that express his doubt

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about imperfect knowledge in the human world, as well as his faith in the possibility of perfect knowledge in eternity, when one is face to face with the divine. The sweet face of God might seem to turn the reader towards the racial logic of white faciality, Christian triumphalism and the defeat of the dorsal turn. But does white faciality truly triumph in the King of Tars? Is that the only reading –​one that is face to face –​possible? Within the textual matrix of the poem, there are at least two manuscript lineages with distinct endings to the narrative. The Auchinleck manuscript, which is the base text for most modern editions of the poem, is incomplete. The poem ends abruptly at line 1229 (fol. 13vb). The final image is a bloody killing field littered with the decapitated heads of Muslims: ‘And Cristen men withouten wene /​Striken off her hevedes al bidene’ (1228–​9). The torsoless heads lie before us in stillness. The text, in a sense, is shorn. Scholars are unable to determine definitively how many lines are lost, though it is probably no more than forty to sixty.213 In contrast to the Auchinleck, the Vernon manuscript includes the final stanza on the sweet face of God, which has supplied the ending in the TEAMS edition.214 Whereas the Auchinleck manuscript stops at the dorsal side of flesh, the Vernon manuscript ends on the ventral side of the divine body politic. Reading for narrative closure is reading as foreclosure, which follows the logic of the future perfect: resolution will happen because it has already been anticipated, and therefore has already happened. Reading as foreclosure is a kind of hermeneutic interpellation: the text turns in response to the hailing of the reader. In the King of Tars, to read for closure is to enface the text. The ending of the King of Tars figures yet another indeterminate lump. It could be the sweet face of God, the bloody mound of severed heads, both or neither. The lump, be it a child or a text, is the systemic edge between the flesh and the body; it is Benjamin’s Angel of History, Janus-​ faced but also Janus-​ backed. ‘[M]‌ake Cristen men’ (740), the romance proclaims as its central mission. But the making of Christians enfolds the making of humans, especially their faces. Such efforts at somatechnologisation, however, are nothing more than a ruse, for the lump is always a child, just as the Sultan’s skin colour has always remained unchanged. The King of Tars ends, wherever it happens, in the vortex of racialisation: the

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schapen flesh, the whitened skin and the killing field. But the poem also ends as it begins, in faces and lumps. Reaching the end of the poem is not necessarily the same as reaching the dorsal side of the text. Behind and in the midst of violence, there is the stillness before the flesh, the stillness of the shock of recognition. Blindness might disguise the shock as a public secret, but it is only ever a ruse of analogy, a deployment of Christian somatechnics. The dorsality of whiteness is the refusal of the logic of racialisation that turns white flesh into white* body.

Notes 1 David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 47. 2 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), p. 15. 3 Chandler, John H. (ed.), The King of Tars (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015). Citations by line numbers. 4 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17:2 (1987), 67. 5 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 211. 6 Wills, Dorsality, p. 5. 7 Oliver Sacks, ‘Face-​Blind’, New Yorker (23 August 2010), 36. 8 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108:1 (2009), 9, original emphasis. 9 Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 8. See also pp. 19–​20. 10 Ibid., p. 4. 11 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3–​23. 12 Gates, Our Biometric Future, p. 11. 13 Ibid., p. 21. 14 See, for instance, Kathy Pezdek, Matthew O’Brien and Corey Wasson, ‘Cross-​Race (but Not Same-​Race) Face Identification Is Impaired by Presenting Faces in a Group Rather Than Individually’, Law and Human Behavior, 36:6 (2012), 488–​95; and Otto H. MacLin and Roy S. Malpass, ‘Racial Categorization of Faces: The Ambiguous

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Race Face Effect’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7:1 (2001), 98–​118. 15 Gwen Sharp, ‘Nikon Camera Says Asians Are Always Blinking’, Sociological Images (29 May 2009). https://​thes​ocie​typa​ges.org/​ socima​ges/​2009/​05/​29/​nikon-​cam​era-​says-​asi​ans-​are-​alw​ays-​blink​ing/​ (accessed on 1 May 2021). 16 Joy Buolamwini, ‘When the Robot Doesn’t See Dark Skin’, New York Times (21 June 2018). https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2018/​06/​21/​opin​ion/​ fac​ial-​analy​sis-​tec​hnol​ogy-​bias.html?smid=​url-​share (accessed on 1 May 2021). 17 Joy Buolamwini, Gendershades.org. http://​gende​rsha​des.org/​index. html (accessed on 1 May 2021). 18 Holly A. Crocker, ‘In the Flesh’, postmedieval, 4:4 (2013), 396. 19 See Debra Higgs Strickland, ‘Introduction: The Future is Necessarily Monstrous’, Different Vision, 2 (2010), 1–​13; and Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Are the “Monstrous Races” Races?’ postmedieval, 6:1 (2015), 36–​51. 20 See the interactive site of the Hereford Mappa Mundi at https://​www. themap​pamu​ndi.co.uk/​ (accessed on 1 May 2021). 21 See Michael Camille, ‘Obscenity Under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,’ in Jan M. Ziolkowski (ed.), Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 139–​54; and Jennifer Borland, ‘Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a Medieval Manuscript’, in Jonathan Wilcox (ed.), Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 97–​114. 22 Katie L. Walter, ‘The Form of the Formless: Medieval Taxonomies of Skin, Flesh, and the Human’, in Katie L. Walter (ed.), Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 126. 23 John Trevisa, The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De regimine principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs and Paul G. Remley (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 216. 24 Guy de Chauliac, The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret S. Ogden, EETS o.s. 265 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 128. 25 Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, ed. and trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1:846. 26 See Lillian H. Hornstein, ‘A Folklore Theme in the King of Tars’, Philological Quarterly, 20 (1941), 82–​7.

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27 See Jane Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction: The Lump-​ Child and Its Parents in The King of Tars’, in Nicola McDonald (ed.), Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 102–​ 23; Jamie Friedman, ‘Making Whiteness Matter: The King of Tars’, postmedieval, 6:1 (2015), 52–​ 63; Lynn Ramey, ‘Medieval Miscegenation: Hybridity and the Anxiety of Inheritance’, in Jerold C. Frakes (ed.), Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–​ 19; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 228–​37; Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 113–​ 21; Anna Czarnowus, ‘ “Stille as Ston”: Oriental Deformity in The King of Tars’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 44 (2008), 463–​74; Sarah Star, ‘Anima Carnis in Sanguine Est: Blood, Life, and The King of Tars’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 115:4 (2013), 442–​ 62; Sierra Lomuto, ‘The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars (c. 1330)’, Exemplaria, 31:3 (2019), 171–​92; Molly Lewis, ‘ “Blob Child” Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars’, in Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (eds), Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 147–​62; and Shyama Rajendran, ‘E(rac)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power’, in Godden and Mittman (eds), Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman, pp. 127–​43. 28 Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, pp. 120–​1, 124–​6 and 132–​4. 29 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 172. 30 Ibid., p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 5. 32 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 5 33 Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, ‘Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’ GLQ, 21:2–​3 (2015), 184. They mislabelled Aguilar’s photo as ‘Grounded #114’. 34 Amelia Jones, ‘Performing the Other as Self: Cindy Sherman and Laura Aguilar Pose the Subject’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 93.

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35 Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, 186. 36 Ibid., 184. 37 Ibid., 184. 38 Stefanie Snider, ‘Social Intelligibility and the In/​visible Body: Laura Aguilar’s Self-​Portraits’, in Rebecca Epstein (ed.), Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2017), p. 75. See also Macarena Gómez-​ Barris, ‘Mestiza Cultural Memory: The Self-​Ecologies of Laura Aguilar’, in Epstein (ed.), Laura Aguilar, pp. 79–​85. 39 Sacks, ‘Face-​Blind’, 36. 40 Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, p. 129. 41 See, for instance, Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 102. 42 MED, s.v. ‘gobet’, 1(a), 2 and 4. 43 Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory & Event, 5:3 (2001), Thesis 8. 44 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 237. 45 Higgins, Iain Macleod (ed.), The Book of John Mandeville (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), p. 99. 46 Kellie Robertson, ‘Exemplary Rocks’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (New York: punctum books, 2012), p. 92. 47 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 171. 48 Ibid., p. 171, original emphasis. 49 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–​1990, trans. Martin Joghin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 26. 50 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 170. For medieval studies on the face, see Michael Edward Moore, ‘Meditations on the Face in the Middle Ages (with Levinas and Picard)’, Literature and Theology, 24:1 (2010), 19–​37; Stephanie Trigg, ‘Chaucer’s Silent Discourse’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 39 (2017), 31–​56; and Kim M. Phillips, ‘The Grins of Others: Figuring Ethnic Difference in Medieval Facial Expressions’, postmedieval, 8:1 (2017), 83–​101. 51 See Ross Burns, Damascus: A History (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 231–​63. Chandler suggests that in the romance, Damascus ‘is a logical place to capture both the legendary East and still be convincing as a location close to a Christian kingdom’ (King of Tars, pp. 53–​4). 52 Judith Perryman (ed.), The King of Tars (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980), pp. 47–​8.

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53 Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992), pp. 188–​9. 54 Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 26, original emphasis. 55 Ibid., p. 26. 56 Ibid., p. 26. 57 Wills, Dorsality, p. 3. 58 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 5. 59 Ibid., p. 13. 60 Nikki Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics’, TSQ, 1:1–​2 (2014), 189–​90. 61 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 152–​3. 62 The term was coined by Susan Stryker and her colleagues at Macquarie University in 2003; see Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics’, 188. See also Michael O’Rourke and Noreen Giffney, ‘Originary Somatechnicity’, in Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray (eds), Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. xi–​xiii. 63 Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics’, 188. 64 Wills, Dorsality, p. 3. For ‘articulation’ as a movement of the limbs, see OED, s.v. ‘articulation’, I.2. 65 Wills, Dorsality, p. 5. 66 Ibid., p. 7. 67 Ibid., p. 4. 68 Ibid., p. 4. 69 Ibid., p. 7, original emphasis. 70 Ibid., p. 12. 71 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 167. 72 Ibid., p. 168, original emphasis. 73 Erving Goffman, ‘On Face-​Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’, in Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-​to-​Face Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), p. 7. 74 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 170. 75 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’, in Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writing (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 167. 76 Ibid., p. 167. 77 Wills, Dorsality, p. 47.

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78 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. xviii. 79 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 50, original emphasis. 80 Wills, Dorsality, p. 46. 81 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 39. 82 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 174. 83 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 3. 84 Wills, Dorsality, pp. 35–​6. 85 Butler, Psychic Life, p. 107. 86 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). For studies of medieval praxes of secrecy, see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Benjamin A. Saltzman, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 87 Ibid., p. 5. 88 Ibid., pp. 2 and 7. 89 Ibid., p. 7. 90 Kenneth Surin, ‘The Sovereign Individual and Michael Taussig’s Politics of Defacement’, Nepantla: Views from South, 2:1 (2001), 206. 91 Taussig, Defacement, p. 2. 92 Stella North, ‘The Surfacing of the Self: The Clothing-​Ego’, in Shiela L. Cavanagh, Angela Failler and Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst (eds), Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 70. 93 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 131. 94 Althusser, ‘Ideology’, p. 180. 95 Wills, Dorsality, p. 12. 96 See Eliza Buhrer, ‘ “If in Other Respects He Appears to Be Effectively Human”: Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law’, in Godden and Mittman (eds), Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman, pp. 63–​83. Buhrer notes, ‘Outside the world of the poem, the lump would not have been able to receive baptism because contemporary

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theologians held that like stillbirths, monsters who lacked a human form should not be baptized’ (70). 97 Butler, Psychic Life, p. 4. 98 See Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, p. 130. 99 Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 117. 100 Ibid., p. 119. 101 Althusser, ‘Ideology’, p. 87. 102 MED, s.v. ‘lumpe’, 1(a), 1(b) and 1(e). 103 See Hilmo, Medieval Images, p. 117. See also Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-​ Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 33. 104 See Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, pp. 121–​6; also Katie L. Walter, ‘Fragments for a Medieval Theory of Prosthesis’, Textual Practice, 30:7 (2016), 1347–​9. 105 Robert von Fleischhacker (ed.), Lanfrank’s ‘Science of Cirurgie’, EETS o.s. 102 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), pp. 27–​8. See also Richard H. Godden, ‘Flesh’, in Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin and Lynn Shutters (eds), A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), pp. 269–​84. I would like to thank Rick Godden for his generous advice. 106 Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, p. 121. 107 See Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 106; Alain Boureau, ‘The Sacrality of One’s Own Body in the Middle Ages’, Yale French Studies, 86 (1994), 5–​17; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 98–​102; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 113–​15. 108 For the influence of Aristotle and Scholasticism on Merleau-​Ponty, see Richard Kearney, ‘The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricoeur and Merleau-​ Ponty’, in Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz and Richard Kearney (eds), Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), p. 43. 109 Ibid., p. 43. 110 Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 166. 111 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 139.

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112 Albertus Magnus, De mineralibus. Alberti Magni opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet and Emile Borgnet (Paris: L. Vives, 1890), p. 29. Modern English translation in Cohen, Stone, p. 218. 113 Cohen, Stone, p. 22. 114 MED, s.v. ‘stille’, 1(a), 1(c), 2(b) and 2(c). 115 Cohen, Stone, p. 131. 116 Taussig, Defacement, pp. 250–​1. 117 Ibid., p. 252. 118 MED, s.v. ‘astoned’, 1 and 3. See also Cohen, Stone, p. 132. 119 MED, s.v. ‘selcouth’, 1(a), 2(a) and 2(b). 120 Star, ‘Anima Carnis’, 447. 121 Wills, Dorsality, p. 5, original emphasis. 122 Ibid., p. 16. 123 Von Fleischhacker (ed.), Lanfrank’s ‘Science of Cirurgie’, pp. 21–​22. See also Walter, ‘Medieval Theory of Prosthesis’, 1348; and Walter, ‘Form of the Formless’, p. 125. 124 London, British Library, Sloane MS 1101, fol. 164r. Transcribed by E. Ruth Harvey. I would like to thank Sarah Star and Professor Harvey for generously sharing the transcription with me. See Henry Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition, ed. E. Ruth Harvey, M. Teresa Tavormina and Sarah Star (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 125 My translation. 126 Star, ‘Anima Carnis’, 444. 127 Czarnowus, ‘Oriental Deformity’, 469. 128 Heng, Empire of Magic, pp. 231–​2. 129 Friedman, ‘Making Whiteness Matter’, pp. 52 and 54. 130 Lomuto, ‘Mongol Princess’, 183. 131 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 234. 132 Kearney, ‘Recovery of the Flesh’, p. 43. See also Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (eds), Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 133 See Star, ‘Anima Carnis’, 454; Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 101; and Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 232. 134 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby’, 67. 135 Alvin J. Henry, Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), p. 5. 136 Michelle Ann Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 4. 137 Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​ Thinking (Philadelphia, PA: University of

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Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Whitaker notes, ‘Rhetorical mirage, as well as its shimmer, is the visual mirage’s linguistic extension’ (p. 5). Whitaker adapts the term ‘shimmer’ from Michelle R. Warren, ‘Shimmering Philology’, postmedieval, 5:4 (2014), 389–​97. 138 F. Krause, ‘Kleine publicationen aus der Auchinleck-​hs, IX: The King of Tars’, Englische Studien, 11 (1888), 1–​62; the comma is between lines 445 and 446 on p. 44. And Perryman, King of Tars, lines 448–​9 on p. 85. 139 Lisa Lampert, ‘Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-​) Middle Ages’, MLQ, 65:3 (2004), 408. See also Ramey, ‘Medieval Miscegenation’, p. 8. 140 See Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 230; Czarnowus, ‘Oriental Deformity’, 468; Friedman, ‘Making Whiteness Matter’, p. 57; Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 116; and Lomuto, ‘Mongol Princess’, 180–​1. 141 Whitaker, Black Metaphors, p. 37. 142 William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-​Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994). In Passus XX: ‘That this Iesus of his gentrice shal iouste in Pers armes, /​In his helm and in his haberion, humana natura’ (20.21–​2). 143 Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 23. 144 I use the edition of the Vernon manuscript by Krause, ‘Auchinleck-​hs, IX: The King of Tars’. 145 MED, s.v. ‘lien’, 3(d) and 6(c). 146 Wills, Dorsality, p. 17. 147 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 86, original emphasis. 148 Ibid., p. 14. 149 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 37. 150 Steven F. Kruger, ‘The Times of Conversion’, Philological Quarterly, 92:1 (2013), 19–​39. 151 Ibid., 32. 152 Ibid., 30. 153 Ibid., 30. 154 Roland Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavars (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 56. 155 OED, s.v. ‘idol’. 156 See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–​ 1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 206. 157 See Star, ‘Anima Carnis’, 456.

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158 For an overview of medieval conceptions of idolatry, see Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Idol of the Text’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 43–​62. 159 Wills, Dorsality, p. 35. Wills refers to Althusser, ‘Ideology’, p. 82. 160 Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 215–​16. 161 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 188. 162 Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 206. See also p. 207. 163 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? p. 188, original emphasis. 164 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 406. 165 Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics’, 189. 166 Taussig, Defacement, p. 53. 167 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols’, in Dimmick, Simpson and Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm, p. 42. 168 Zeeman, ‘Idol of the Text’, p. 45. 169 Micah James Goodrich, ‘Maimed Limbs and Biosalvation: Rehabilitation Politics in “Piers Plowman” ’, in Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Kłosowska (eds), Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 267 and 269. 170 On idols becoming lumps, see Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 106; and Chandler, King of Tars, p. 68. 171 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? p. 194, original emphasis. 172 Taussig, Defacement, p. 2. 173 Ibid., p. 3. 174 Fradenburg, ‘Love of Idols’, p. 42. 175 For discussion of medieval hermeneutics of typology and tropology, see Ryan McDermott, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–​1600 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp. 1–​10. 176 Chandler, King of Tars, p. 9. 177 Whitaker, Black Metaphors, p. 23. 178 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, p. 38. See also Frank B. Wilderson, III, ‘Afropessimism and the Ruse of Analogy: Violence, Freedom Struggles, and the Death of Black Desire’, in Moon-​Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (eds), Antiblackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 37–​59. In the 2021 article, Wilderson elaborates further: ‘The paradigm of violence that positions and oppresses degraded

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forms of Humanity, such as colored immigrants, women (who are not Black), LGBT people, Indigenous people, and working-​class folks (who are not Black), cannot be analogized with the paradigm of violence that positions and oppresses Blackness’ (p. 41). 179 The generic term ‘Saracen’, popular in the Middle Ages, denotes a variety of Muslims and non-​Western Christians; it has no equivalent form in Arabic. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Race’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013), p. 117; and Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1975), p. 53. See also Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, ‘The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019), 1–​8. Rajabzadeh argues that, given the history of racism and Islamophobia, scholarship should use the term ‘Muslim’ instead of ‘Saracen’ in general discussion, except for direct quotations and specific contextual qualifications. I follow Rajabzadeh’s recommendation in this chapter. 180 Taussig, Defacement, p. 2. 181 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 17. 182 Ibid., p. 17. 183 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​ Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5. 184 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-​ Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 21, original emphasis. 185 Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 17. 186 Arthur L. Little, Jr, ‘Re-​ Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and Shakespearean Property’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67:1 (2016), 84–​103. 187 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xi. 188 Little, ‘Re-​Historicizing Race’, 88. 189 Ibid., 92. 190 Ibid., 92. 191 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 14. 192 Cheryl Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, 106:8 (1993), 1709. 193 Ibid., 1731. 194 Buhrer, ‘Defining Monstrosity’, 68. 195 Ibid., 68.

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96 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, p. 39. 1 197 Ibid., p. 44. 198 See Henry, Black Queer Flesh, p. 3; Henry defines Black queer flesh as a mode of being and a living archive. 199 Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Mirror-​role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, in Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 111, original emphasis. 200 Ibid., p. 111. 201 Ibid., p. 114. 202 Ibid., p. 112, original emphasis. 203 Ibid., p. 118. 204 Sullivan, ‘Somatechnics’, 188. 205 Winnicott, ‘Mirror-​role of Mother’, p. 118. 206 Barthes, ‘Face of Garbo’, p. 56. 207 Ibid., p. 56. 208 Winnicott, ‘Mirror-​role of Mother’, pp. 112–​13. 209 Ibid., p. 113. 210 See Jenny Edkin, Face Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 72–​ 8. For mirror neurons, see, for instance, Marco Iacoboni, ‘The Human Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in Imitation and Empathy’, in Frans B. M. de Waal and Pier Francesco Ferrari (eds), The Primate Mind: Built to Connect with Other Minds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 32–​47. 211 Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 6. 212 Gilbert, ‘Putting the Pulp into Fiction’, p. 112. 213 Chandler, King of Tars, p. 79. 214 The Simeon manuscript, which also contains the King of Tars, is copied from the Vernon. Chandler proposes a third possibility that both the Vernon and Auchinleck were originally copied from another source text that lacks an ending, and the Vernon scribe simply provided a conclusion; see Chandler, King of Tars, p. 20 n.79.

6 In the lap of whiteness

[Race] designates a certain historico-​political divide. –​Michel Foucault1 [E]‌mpathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. –​Leslie Jamison2

Periodisation is not a line but a hold. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the hold is a figure of modern logisticality: at the literal level, the hold of a slave ship.3 But the hold is also the containerisation of deformed subjects and unformed objects, as bodies become fungible properties. White capitalism is the hold, which operationalises the co-​formation of white logistics and Black bodies. The hold signifies the co-​production of race and history; it is both periodising and racialising. Modernity, in other words, ‘is sutured by this hold’.4 It might appear that the hold is the womb that gave birth to modernity and its constellation of liberalism, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Yet the hold, by the fact of its emergence and its terrible cargoes, is already troubled by the multiple modes of temporality it contains. If the ship is a metonym of modernity, then the shipped corporealities carry with them an absolute refusal of the logics of modernity. Body is not flesh, and flesh is not capital. The white ship of modernity may gloss its cargoes as embodied properties, but the Black flesh cannot be the shipped body. The reality of, as well as the insistence on, the Black flesh registers its repudiation of the twinned impulses of racialisation and periodisation of and in the hold, for it is the flesh that engenders affects that counter the production of whiteness under modern logistics. To be in the hold is to have a new kind of

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feel and feeling, as bodily affection transforms and the container generates new sensations and indelible emotions. To be moved, to be held, is to refuse the logistics of transport and the logic of racial capitalism. Considering medieval and early modern strategies of racialisation and periodisation, I ask: What did the premodern hold look like? What terrible cargoes did it traffic? And what affective communities did it enfold? Instead of approaching the premodern hold from an explicitly biologised and modern understanding of race, or from a strictly cultural-​political model of historiography, I propose a method grounded primarily in empathy studies. I take as my test case the Squire’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, which reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. In Part 1, Cambyuskan (as the historical Genghis Khan) holds a birthday celebration for himself, during which a Mamluk knight presents four magical objects as gifts: a flying brass horse, a mirror of truth, a sword that maims and heals and a ring that allows its wearer to understand the language of birds. In Part 2, Canacee, a Mongol princess, wanders in a forest wearing the magic ring that her father Cambyuskan has given her. There, she holds a wounded female falcon in her lap as she listens to the bird’s complaint. As Part 3 begins, however, the tale stops abruptly and remains incomplete. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person or situation, characterises the affective similitude interposed between Canacee and the falcon. Canacee’s empathic lap is one figuration of the premodern hold that attempts to contain and erase difference. Empathy as an approach to history and cross-​racial encounters, however, is deeply problematic. Next, I examine periodisation as the historiographic equivalent to racial passing, arguing that classification and recognition do not always align. The empathic scene is often a failed encounter marked by the noncoincidence of subjects or objects. The falcon, placed into the lap by Canacee, signifies whiteness as racial capital in the guise of European courtliness. The lap, in this instance, is a premodern hold that traffics whiteness as its terrible load. As an operational asterisk, the lap joins together gentillesse and white capitalism. I then turn to the reception history of the Squire’s Tale, in which readers have constructed a modern, Orientalising Part 1 vis-​à-​vis a medieval, de-​Orientalising

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Part 2. The critical periodising impulses extend to early modern assessments of Chaucer. Milton’s designation of the tale as ‘half told’ is a Foucauldian contre-​practice that emblematises all sorts of modernist and Orientalist efforts at periodising and racialising texts, bodies and histories. Finally, I consider the limits of figural approaches to periodisation and racialisation and advocate the practice of critical implication in place of interpellation.

Feeling into the lap Within medieval studies, Edward Said’s critical concept ‘Orientalism’ has been instrumental in the discipline’s attempts at thinking through medieval manifestations of postcoloniality, while carefully assessing and qualifying deployments of postcolonial theories within premodern contexts.5 But Orientalism, if not handled with care, conveniently degenerates into an intellectual cheat sheet –​a trope of a trope –​that pre-​emptively evacuates analyses of race via the logic of culturally inflected difference.6 For instance, in Susan Crane’s reading of the Squire’s Tale, the Squire-​ narrator views ‘romantic orientalism’ more as an exoticising narrative device than a deeply fraught trope in need of careful deployment; as for the visceral difficulties of cross-​racial encounters and the transhistorical enactments inseparable from Orientalism, he appears ill-​equipped to confront them directly. For Crane, the tale ‘reflects romantic orientalism but moves beyond it’ by turning to gender and animal difference, as if gender and species affinities alone could sublimate differences of race and history.7 The narrative in fact never steps outside of Orientalism. What then are some meaningful interpretive strategies to situate a text like the Squire’s Tale in premodern critical race studies (PCRS)?8 One approach that both resuscitates the theoretical rigours of Orientalism and attends to matters of premodern race, I contend, is through affect and emotion, as they are entangled with premodern racialisation and periodisation. Specifically, I would like to examine the workings of empathy in the Squire’s Tale. Empathy, according to Suzanne Keen, is ‘a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect [that] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading’.9

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Engaging affect and cognition, empathy is the capacity to imagine or feel another person’s feeling, act or situation: ‘I feel what you feel’. Negative affects are particularly effective at triggering empathy: ‘I feel your pain’. Empathy describes the process by which the affective state of the other (‘your pain’) hails the subject (‘I’) into being via vicarious feeling. It is a form of interpellation; the first-​person subject emerges out of an awareness of the object in affection and of the difference between subject and object; the object is in turn interpellated as the second-​person subject. I feel your pain, but I am not you. You in pain are not I; you are you.10 Empathy is the English translation of the German Einfühlung. As a concept and a word, empathy is relatively young, appearing at the end of the nineteenth century with roots in cognitive psychology and aesthetics. Rather than focusing on the work of art itself, the then emerging science of aesthetics turned to the spectator’s response to art. The aesthetic experience is characterised by Einfühlung, the process of ‘feeling one’s way into’ an art object.11 As Susan Lanzoni explains, Theodor Lipps conceived of Einfühlung as ‘the projection of one’s own unconscious feelings and inner imagined movements into the art object, which were then experienced within the object itself’.12 By the 1890s, the Einfühlung response theory had spread from Germany to international academia. In 1909, Edward Titchener coined the term ‘empathy’ as his translation of Einfühlung. In Titchener’s formulation, empathy’s connotations broaden from a strictly aesthetic response of feeling oneself into an art object to a more expansive sense of feeling oneself into an unfamiliar situation in order to understand it. As Titchener explains, ‘This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called empathy’.13 The reading experience, according to Titchener, exemplifies the empathic response: ‘We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer’.14 Keen names the fictive, textual-​based empathic experience ‘narrative empathy’.15 Further extending the empathic response to include non-​artistic objects, Titchener suggests that empathy is ‘a process of humanising objects, of reading or feeling ourselves into them’.16 Anthropomorphism, it turns out, is an act of empathy.

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Yet despite the relative youthfulness of empathy as a term, the concept if not the name has a much longer history. Against the modern conception of empathy as a strictly aesthetic and cognitive experience, Karl F. Morrison charts a broad transhistorical phenomenon of empathy as a mode of understanding in the West. Conceding that empathy is ‘a challenge to enter into an object of understanding’, Morrison nonetheless argues that affective entry is but one aspect of the hermeneutics of empathy.17 The key to his cultural history is the phrase ‘I am you’, possibly Vedic in origin, that emerged in the second century CE among Neoplatonists and ran through John Donne, to Romanticism, to Hans-​Georg Gadamer’s phenomenology. ‘I am you’ expresses understanding as an affective process and as a desire for discursive union with the divine. Empathy is further characterised by a dichotomy between a positive/​amorous and a negative/​malevolent content. Whereas positive empathy leads to the solipsism of I =​I, negative empathy points to the recognition of you =​you. The tension, or ‘dynamic play’, in the hermeneutic gap between the positive and negative forces of empathy is crucial to one’s reaching empathic understanding.18 And the hermeneutic gap is ‘part of any inquiry’, Morrison suggests.19 Within medieval studies, empathy as a historiographic method has had a mixed reception.20 Nicholas Watson, channelling Morrison, suggests that historical empathy is endemic to historiography; its recognition will systematise empathy’s uses in the discipline, recuperate its hermeneutic power and practise an ethic of care of the past.21 The richness of empathy lies in its varied means of expression and communication: aural, textual, visual and kinaesthetic. In Part 2 of the Squire’s Tale, the falcon first appears as an alien creature from a foreign land.22 As she wanders in the forest, Canacee is stunned by the bloody spectacle of a self-​mutilating, shrieking falcon in the canopy above her. Because narrative empathy demands affective connection and emotional fusion, Keen argues, ‘The fictions that evoke it transcend … the barriers of non-​existence and illogic’.23 Canacee’s ring, which gives her the ability to understand avian tongue, seems to be the empathic portal granting her entry into the strange object that is the falcon. Her empathetic response begins with an upward gaze, as she ‘on this faukon looketh pitously’ (V.440). The visual traffic resembles what Sarah McNamer describes as the practice of

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‘empathetic beholding’ in medieval devotional literature, in which readers are instructed to behold and reflect upon religious texts and/​or images.24 The Middle English beholden means to generate a sensory perception and provide protective holding; to behold is to incur an ethical obligation.25 Canacee reads the scene above her as pathetic, and her mirroring of the falcon’s affective state is an obligatory response triggered by her empathetic beholding: like the falcon, ‘almoost she deyde’ (V.438), and she weeps inconsolably (V.496). Worried that the falcon might fall and die, Canacee ‘heeld hir lappe abrood’ (V.441) beneath its perch.26 The vertical distance between Canacee and the falcon marks the empathic distance between them; it also recreates the vertical separation between the Lady and her lover in medieval courtly literature. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Guinevere watches Lancelot’s battles from her vantage point in a tower; and in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, Arcite looks up at Emily after his victory over Palamon, while she smiles down at him. The falcon unwittingly occupies the role of courtly lady, and Canacee, the traditional male lover. When Canacee places the falcon in her lap, verticality collapses and empathy is complete. The falcon reciprocates Canacee’s empathetic beholding: ‘Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte, /​Feelynge his similitude in peynes smerte’ (V.479–​ 80). Empathy pivots on the logic of similitude and reciprocity. Similitude completes the empathic loop and connects analogy (Canacee and the falcon) to metonymy (gentil herte), transforming difference into identity. The falcon-​ Canacee-​ lap is a homo-​ affective assemblage, an animal-​human thing that blurs the borders of body, object and species.27 Canacee’s homoerotically charged lap evokes medieval dream visions in which a homosocial dream space is frequently the site of collective mourning and empathy. In Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse, the narrator meets an aristocratic author, who then falls asleep in his lap; when the narrator also falls asleep while holding the aristocrat, the two men dream the same dream.28 Dream visions, Steven F. Kruger explicates, are premodern proto-​ figurations of psychoanalysis because of their intense affective transfers and structures of consolation.29 Canacee’s lap is not unlike the psychoanalytic lap described by Donald

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W. Winnicott. For Winnicott, whereas withdrawal is a negative detachment from reality, regression is potentially beneficial as it offers the patient a chance to renegotiate with their past. Winnicott observes that during sessions his patient would curl up on the couch as if it were a lap or a womb. The task of the analyst, therefore, is to provide a medium, a psychic lap, that converts the patient’s withdrawal, in which the patient is holding the self, into regression, in which the analyst is holding the patient.30 In the Squire’s Tale, Canacee’s lap interrupts the falcon’s self-​wounding withdrawal and triggers a regression back to her past trauma. By providing a lap of empathy, Canacee is holding the falcon; she is feeling like a bird feeling like a woman. The lap as an instrument of psychoanalysis also functions as a metaphor for an empathy-​based historiographic method. Johann Gottfried Herder, in the eighteenth century, conceived of Einfühlung as a form of understanding via cognitive imagination and a response to nature or art. Confronted with the past –​understood as a strange and unfamiliar object, person or situation –​the historian enters history in order to hold it in their lap: ‘go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything’.31 In the twentieth century, medieval historian Johan Huizinga practised Herder’s Einfühlung in his work, envisioning the emergence of a ‘historical sensation’ out of a contact with the past, figured as ‘the entrance into a world of its own’.32 And in 2015, Jeff Rider reinvigorated Huizinga’s methodology and proposed that we practise empathetic identification with the Middle Ages through historical artefacts.33 Along this intellectual lineage from Herder, to Huizinga, to Rider, objects of history are time-​travel machines; they are dialectical signs that index the residual and the emergent. While empathy as a critical method provides an affective medium to access the past, the entry into the unknown is not without its trepidations. It may strike some as excessive romantic attachment to objects that borders on fetishisation. Within the history of enslavement and settler colonialism, empathy touches not only the distant past but also racial difference as the other. Cross-​racial empathy does not mark any break with the past, the transcendence of difference or entry into a post-​racial utopia. In fact, to enter racial difference is to enter a dangerous territory; things could go south really

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quickly. Empathy could become a Master’s tool that interpellates racial difference and instils violence.34 Through his deployment of occupatio, the Squire nudges his audience to feel themselves into the fabricated exoticism of Tartary that is his Oriental hold, mirroring the Mamluk knight’s invitation to Cambyuskan’s courtiers to wonder into the magical gifts he has brought. The Squire constructs cross-​ racial empathy only to misrecognise the Tartars as pure strangeness. The tale is his lap, and we are the falcon. Insofar as narrative empathy is a variety of fantasy empathy, it borrows from the greater cultural-​historical racial imaginary.35 As the counterpart to the (post)colonial Mimic Man, Canacee is the Empathic Woman. Holding the falcon in her lap, she enters a fantasy.

‘Wrong Asian but ok’ Periodisation is the art of passing. This is true not only in the sense of the passage of time, but also in the sense that units of history often pass as, or pass off as, one period designation or another. Period passing therefore resembles racial passing. As Margreta de Grazia observes, ‘We anthropomorphize [periods], individuating one period from another by an animating spirit (Zeitgeist) and an informing consciousness’; indeed, periods have their idiosyncratic physiognomies, psychologies and pathologies.36 To insist that a particular historical artefact, or unit of time, belong to one side of a historic divide is to assert its rightful habitation there and nowhere else. Jacques Le Goff, for instance, proposes a ‘long Middle Ages in the Christian West’ that stretches from the late antiquity to the middle of the eighteenth century.37 He denies a pivotal role in history to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, arguing that the early modern phase is really the last subperiod of the Middle Ages; that the Renaissance is ‘the harbinger of a truly modern age, [but] not the age itself’; and that modernity began with industrialisation, secularisation and the emergence of history as an academic discipline.38 Le Goff thereby passes off the early modern as the late medieval, further extending the Huizinganian waning of the Middle Ages. Period passing is a deceptively facile but highly fraught act of nominal differentiation. It is further complicated by the attachment

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of all sorts of qualifying descriptors to period labels that would seem to tighten or loosen their temporal borders. Brian Cummings, for example, speaks of ‘the receding Renaissance’, whereas David Matthews sees a ‘deferred renaissance’ with a lowercase ‘r’.39 Like racial passing, depending on how a period passes, it may have access to certain privileges or be condemned to the underprivileged class. For most theorists, modernity is the de facto site of privilege. The allure of modernity, such as progress, liberalism, secularism and imperialism, has been deconstructed so many times that the critiques themselves have become citational reflexes.40 Yet the cachet of modernity endures. As Kathleen Davis theorises, ‘The “becoming medieval” ’ of the Middle Ages provided the hinge that made possible the spatiotemporal narrative of modern development’.41 This hinge is mobile, however, and the point of passage into modernity is never quite fixed. Or, the hinge of periodisation is a movable asterisk, an operation of time; the becoming modern is the unbecoming of the medieval. The modern is always already ‘*modern’, mobilising the indexical and haptic powers of period passing. Mimicking the hipster shine of the postmodern, the medieval sometimes passes as the premodern; and the Renaissance has transitioned into the early modern, the early colonial or even the post-​medieval.42 Period passing is a game of stretching the modern continuum, as de Grazia notes. The retention of the root word modern legitimates the pre-​ and the post-​as modernity’s prequel and sequel, with the results of ‘an earlier-​early-​modern and a later-​ late-​modern’.43 Periodisation is the art of fuzziness, for historical edges are deliberately blunt, so they ‘kind of sort of’ pass as a situation warrants. But one thing is clear: almost no one wants to be the middle child, if they can help it. To be middle is not only to be fuzzy; it is also to be relegated to obscurity and irrelevance, a mere transitional interval between the past and future. Better to pass as some sort of modern than not pass at all. Ironically, in matters of race, the early modern has been consistently lumped together with the medieval. Ania Loomba suggests that while the binary opposition of the Dark Ages against a modern ‘enlightenment’ persists, ‘the early modern is routinely understood as pre-​modern time when racial ideologies had not taken root’.44 Racial ideologies, here, denote modern, Foucauldian biopolitical

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configurations of racialism and racism, configurations presumed absent in premodernity. The twin process of racialisation and deracialisation, as a technique of periodisation, drives a wedge between the medieval and the modern. In this formulation, the early modern is passed off as medieval, irrelevant and transitional. Period passing stops at the gate of biopolitical race; or, racial non-​ passage is periodised and enforced. The arbitrary, contradictory flexibility and fixity of period designations expose the artificiality of categorical thinking, which passing exploits for strategic historical emplacement. Racial passing, like period passing, is an operation that mobilises the sliding hinge, or asterisk, of borders of racial embodiment. Passing as white is the slippage, not conversion, of white* into whiteness, the wilful erasure of the prehensile asterisk –​the almost-​ but-​not-​quite potential –​that makes passing possible in the first place. In other words, racial passing is the attachment of a seemingly coherent identity to an ambiguous assemblage of flesh. Scholarship on racial passing, particularly in the US context, has focused on the interplay between the crisis of group classification and that of individual recognition. Racial passing depends on categorical indeterminacy and ambiguity, though it carefully masks them.45 Traditional understanding tends to view racial passing as transgressive, as the fraudulent passer disguises their real and essentialised identity. Yet passing challenges the presumed, naturalised essentialism of identity. In recent decades, scholarship has shifted to understanding racial passing from the perspective of performance theory and to conceptualising passing as ‘the iteration of a set of behaviours, cultural codes, language, etc., ascribed to a specific identity category’.46 Passing is repetition of difference as sameness, selectively emphasising some features while deemphasising others. A successful pass recognises the performativity of identity. Akin to J. L. Austin’s performative, racial passing can be felicitous or infelicitous.47 Likewise, period passing can be successful or unsuccessful, felicitous or infelicitous. A felicitous pass elicits and leans in on the empathy of the gatekeeper: ‘Do you feel me? Please feel me as one of you’. When the performance takes place in a text, passing functions as a narrative trope; its empathy, a variety of narrative empathy. Gayle Wald argues that passing narratives in

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American literature are a mode of critique that ‘actively grapple[s]‌ with the circumscribed efficacy of crossing the line’, consequently rendering suspect the drive towards narrative ending or resolution.48 Periodisation, too, is a form of passing narrative that attempts to impose some resolution to historiographical difficulties. It sharpens fuzzy temporal edges and proclaims them precise and impassable. In so doing, periodisation as a passing narrative functions as self-​ critique of its logic of demarcation. Le Goff, conceding that periodisation is never ‘neutral, or innocent’, nonetheless bypasses the early modern period, sharpens the medieval-​modern divide and proclaims he has identified an objective correspondence between ‘a distinguishable chapter of human experience’ and ‘the lives actually lived by people, particularly in the West’.49 Passing deploys misrecognition as one of its primary strategies, and it relies on the false-​positive identification by the gatekeeper. The Squire’s Tale is a passing narrative that wilfully misrecognises peoples, objects and animals across racial, gender, historical, geopolitical and species registers. The Squire passes the Tartars off as exemplary European courtiers, the falcon as human and mechanical devices as magical objects. Indeed, the Tartars in the tale suffer from the problems of being the ‘model minority’, a dubious mantle of distinction bestowed upon contemporary Asian Americans that praises them for approximating whiteness because of their industry and achievements, while reinscribing their minoritarian status as the perpetual alien.50 Whatever these medieval Tartars in the Squire’s Tale are supposed to be, they are definitely the wrong Asians. The kind of deliberate, wondrous wrongness of the Tartars in the Squire’s Tale is best captured by a brilliant design of the graphic artist Linh-​Yen Hoang, entitled Wrong Asian.51 The full design articulates the phrase, ‘Wrong Asian but ok’. As a multi-​tonal visual performative, Wrong Asian announces itself in media res, charting the contours of a failed encounter. It airs a grievance against the offender: ‘Again? After all this time?’ or ‘Seriously? We have never met’. It is a queer performative: ‘Shame on you!’ It performs passive aggression –​the winky ‘Hee, hee, hee!’ –​as a self-​conscious minority stereotype. As it calls out the microaggression in misrecognition, it nevertheless does not quite make the offender pay for it. By hissing the ‘but ok’ underneath the breath, it reverses the direction of

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empathy: ‘I understand. Of course you don’t mean anything by it’. It is soft like Hello Kitty; yet it bares its teeth as it dares the offender to do it again. Wrong Asian exposes the false equivalence among classification, recognition and identity. The messy entanglement calls to mind Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s trenchant warning about ‘the cunning of recognition’ in late capitalist, neoliberal society: be careful of what the regime chooses to classify and recognise.52 I would further suggest that the cunning of recognition is also that of misrecognition, for what gets misrecognised, like what remains unrecognised, reveals as much if not more. Wrong Asian further conjures the terror of a police line-​up and the threat of false cross-​racial identification by an unreliable witness: ‘Not me!’ Social scientists have termed the phenomenon ‘cross-​racial recognition deficit’ (CRRD), which occurs when faces of one’s racial in-​group are more readily memorised and recognised than those belonging to an out-​group.53 As Tamar Szabó Gendler explains, classificatory features are not individuating features.54 Felicitous classification may lead to infelicitous recognition. In Wrong Asian, the racialised subject is a blur, having blended in, or passed, too well.55 Wrong Asian registers a partial interpellation by ideology, a half-​ass hailing: ‘You? There?’ In failure, the subject’s historicity is denied because the passage of time no longer matters. Robbed of historicity and subjectivity, the wrong Asian remains a stranger: ‘Meeting me will always be the first and the last time. I am suspended in the blur of CRRD’. In this instance, failure is not an art. Such is the cunning of racialisation.

Oopsie! The fuzzy microaggression and violence of misrecognition of Wrong Asian underpin the narrative logic of Part 2 of the Squire’s Tale. Beneath the canopy of the chalky white tree, Canacee spreads her lap wide open like a firefighter’s jumping sheet, eagerly waiting for the falcon to drop in as if it were leaping off a burning building. Yet she misses the bird, and the falcon falls straight to the forest floor: ‘Tho shrighte this faucon yet moore pitously /​Than ever she dide, and fil to grounde anon, /​And lith aswowne, deed and lyk a stoon, /​Til Canacee hath in hire lappe hire take’ (V.472–​5). How on earth does Canacee miss the falcon, after all that time waiting?

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Figure 6.1  Linh-​Yen Hoang, Wrong Asian, 2019. Hard enamel pin, 3 × 4 inches. (© Linh-​Yen Hoang. By permission of artist. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Two trajectories, Canacee’s path of the anticipated catch and the falcon’s actual drop, are misaligned. Canacee’s lap, meant to be a life net, fails to break the falcon’s fall. An oopsie. The miss is the noncoincidence of difference and identity. The motion in Part 2 of the Squire’s Tale is emphatically downward. The falcon is remarkable as much as for her self-​mutilated body and piercing shrieks as for her precarious perch (V.430–​1). Running out of patience or endurance, Canacee urges the falcon to ‘com fro the tree adoun’ (V.464). The affective trajectory of the

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tale dictates that down is the only direction available to the falcon. Ironically, the only thing in the tale that manages to go up and fly away is the absent tercelet; the brass horse, designed for flight, never takes off. The falcon’s drop outlines a passage of the body through time and space, a body scarred by a historicity narrativised via a familiar arc moving from origin to courtship, conjugality, betrayal and injury. An alien bird ‘of fremde land’ (V.429), the falcon is a sign of racialised strangeness vis-​à-​vis Canacee, who is comfortably at home in Tartary. As such, the falcon is both the figure of the stranger and the figure of history, which are one and the same. Atop the blighted tree, the wounded history of a racialised stranger transforms into a downward projectile. The past, the falcon’s yet-​ to-​come story, does not flow like a river or fly up and away, but drops hard against reality. The actual trajectories of bodies and histories and the anticipated trajectories of classification and recognition do not always coincide. What might have appeared singular turns out to be multiple; miscalculation is the name of the game, which leads to last-​minute salvage and improvisation. Somewhere in mid-​descent, the falcon must have felt the absence of Canacee’s lap. A trust has been betrayed, and the miss undoubtedly results in additional injuries to the bird. In the encounter, a gap opens between histories and bodies on the one side, and apparatus of identification and containerisation on the other. Nothing is ever quite locked on target; rather than successful passing, unintentional bypassing is the norm. Racialisation and periodisation, in their attempts at ‘catching’ bodies and histories in midstream, often miss their mark because the life net of identity categories, a Master’s tool, is never designed for accurate capture. Sometimes, passing means slipping through undetected, or reappearing on the other side as something else altogether. In ‘Wrong Asian but ok’, misrecognition is symptomatic of the misalignment between identity and category. The zone of contact is always fuzzy, never precise. The motion of empathy may not be a synchronised entry into an unfamiliar aesthetic object, but that of asynchronous catching and enfolding, as is the case with Canacee. Social neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues have studied fMRI data on empathetic responses to witnessing another’s pain. Singer’s ground-​breaking

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study demonstrates a disparity between one’s perception of feeling another’s pain and one’s actual experience of the identical sensation in body and mind. Subjects who watched or imagined a loved one receiving a sharp shock showed activation of the affective portions of their brain’s pain matrix (the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, the lateral cerebellum and the brainstem). However, there was no corresponding activation of the somatosensory cortices of their brain. Empathy, while effective at triggering affective responses, does not activate the motor-​sensory functions. As Singer’s team concludes, ‘Only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy’.56 True empathy is illusory, for the experience is never a full coincidence or synchronisation of affective and sensory-​motor activations. Functioning more like a transporting mechanism for sharing feelings, empathy is a lap, at best partial and noncoincidental; there is no full entry into another’s pain, only affective resonance. It may be more precise to claim, ‘I cognitivise your pain’. I feel your pain in my mind but never in my body. What exactly has Canacee picked up from the ground? The Squire describes the fallen falcon as ‘lith aswowne, deed and lyk a stoon’ (V.474). But ‘aswowne’, ‘deed’ or ‘lyk a stoon’ are three very different states of animacy. The text invites a figurative reading: the falcon is not really dead; she has swooned again and is in suspended animation. Better yet, the simile turns her into a stone. The tangle of analogies replicates the miscalculations of classification and recognition. Canacee does not know precisely what lies at her feet; the falcon is all those descriptors at once and none of them. What is certain is that when Canacee places the falcon in her lap, she reanimates the bird. The falcon, no longer shrieking but speaking, is a talking undead. Only in the lap does language, figured as narrative, begin. Though the Squire specifies that the falcon speaks ‘in hir haukes ledene’ (V.478), it is in human language and by text that she is rendered intelligible. The falcon’s narrative is high art, easily recognisable as the lover’s complaint in courtly literature. In the Middle Ages, the falcon is associated with the nobility; falconry is an aristocratic pursuit and symbolises the hunt of fin’amor in artistic representations. Chaucer, in The Parliament of Fowls, unequivocally designates raptorial birds as the aristocrats of the

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avian world.57 When Canacee first encounters the falcon, prior to its entry into human language, she notes that the bird is ‘As wel of plumage as of gentillesse /​Of shap’ (V.426–​7). Gentillesse, the medieval sign par excellence of courtly identity, is simultaneously visible on the body and innate to the heart. The falcon’s first (human) words to Canacee confirm her courtly status, as ‘pitee renneth soone in gentil herte’ (V.479); and in the affective circuit of shared feelings and pleonastic virtues, a ‘gentil herte kitheth gentillesse’ (V.483). Reborn inside Canacee’s lap, the falcon enters human language as a game of mirrors, for she and Canacee reflect each other’s courtly sensibilities. What Canacee picks up is not a bird but language imprinted as white* gentillesse. The falcon is the mother lode of whiteness. She signifies in no uncertain terms racialisation through whiteness, here coded as courtly language. As Madeline Caviness argues, the high and late Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of a historically contingent ‘white identity’ in visual representations of Europeans, whose flesh tone shifted from a pinkish-​brown to pasty white.58 The chromatic shift can be traced to the Crusades and the increased contacts among European Christians, Muslims and sub-​Saharan Africans. The lighter complexion used to portray European women, developed at the end of the twelfth century, was appropriated by European men for all Europeans in the 1350s.59 Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, likely composed in the 1380s, emerged out of this cultural climate. The falcon is the racial other to Canacee; the bird’s European courtliness identifies its originary ‘fremd land’ as west of Tartary. And as a figurative instrument of whiteness, the falcon is a form of racial capital; her gentillesse, racialised and imbricated with whiteness, is designed for the logistical chain of aristocratic production, valuation and consumption. Premodern whiteness, as refracted through gentillesse, is not quite the same as whiteness under modern colonialism, slavery and imperialism, but it is a crucial part of the history of racial capitalism in the West.60 If modern white capitalism, à la Moten and Harney, traffics in flesh-​qua-​property in the hold, premodern white capitalism, in the Squire’s Tale, circulates gentillesse-​qua-​cultural capital through the lap. Premodern logistics of whiteness is simultaneously racialising, periodising and culturalising.

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Modern translators and illustrators of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale made explicit the implicit whiteness of the falcon, which signifies white racial capital.61 Charles Cowden Clarke, in his 1833 prose translation of the Canterbury Tales, transposes the whiteness of the tree to the falcon: ‘A falcon, “as white as chalk”, that, perched upon a withered tree, was bewailing’.62 In his 1914 translation, F. J. Harvey Darton links the falcon’s whiteness directly to her non-​ Tartar origin: ‘On a bough of a withered tree, sat a peregrine falcon, as white as chalk, and seemingly from some far-​off land’.63 M. L. Kirk’s illustration for Darton’s edition follows closely his translation. And in 1972, Dame Elisabeth Frink visualises Canacee, the tree and the falcon as a white assemblage. Whiteness, in Frink’s etching, divides and connects the falcon and Canacee; it also collapses the vertical distance between them. The falcon is the lodestar of whiteness, and Canacee’s whole being is its lap. Deep into Part 2 of the Squire’s Tale, one almost forgets that Canacee is not white. For a tale purported to be about exotic wonders, oddly, the word straunge appears only a few times in Part 1 in connection with Tartar foods and the Mamluk knight, but not once in Part 2. Canacee is white-​ish, or white-​adjacent, but never strange. She is fully racialised as white when the falcon is emplaced within her lap and the narrative of fin’amor begins. Or, borrowing Barbara Rosenwein’s terminology, the falcon’s emotional sequence unfolds only within the lap.64 That is, the lap is a recursive, universalising time machine, encoded in white, which chronicles the life cycles of love. Periodisation is not a line but a hold; it does not take place in history, but elsewhere –​in objects, in the laps of ideology. Likewise, racialisation does not take place among bodies, but elsewhere in the holds of governmentality. As the hold of elsewhere, the lap is a romance object, like the magical gifts presented by the Mamluk knight to Cambyuskan. It signifies the magic and allure of white racial capitalism. Magical objects, in this instance, are racial contracts drawn in accordance with the logic of the gift. And romance objects, Aranye Fradenburg observes, provoke wonder, which ‘takes place on the edge of the known and the unknown’.65 This edge is the edge of here but is simultaneously the edge of elsewhere; it is also a periodising, racialising kind of edge. All romance objects, conjuring borders, are passing

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Figure 6.2  M. L. Kirk. Colour plate. The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Retold from Chaucer and Others by F. J. Harvey Darton. New York: Stokes, 1914. (Public domain.)

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Figure 6.3  Dame Elisabeth Frink. The Squire’s Tale, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1972. Etching and aquatint on paper, 498 × 347 mm. (The Elisabeth Frink Estate. © 2021. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​DACS, London. Photo © Tate. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

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objects that blur the divide between thing and body. They invite entry and habitation. Canacee’s lap is not quite an object or a body, though it can be either or both. The lap is not exactly a gadget either, but it possesses instrumentality as it mediates embodiment and interpellation. The lap is contingent and improvisational, yet it holds on only by holding its precious cargo. Canacee’s lap conforms to, takes the shape of, the falcon: gentillesse is its shap. But in holding, the lap too is endowed with shaping power; the Middle English verb shapen means ‘to give something specific or definite shape, form’.66 As it conforms to the structure of gentillesse, so too does the lap give shape to time. Canacee’s lap gives shape to the mewe (a bird pen) that she later builds for the falcon in her room. Covered with ‘veluettes blewe’ (V.644) and painted with images of ‘false fowles’ (V.647) on its exterior wall, the mewe is a miniature aristocratic bedchamber that evokes the ekphrastic chambers of medieval dream visions, such as the dream chamber in the Book of the Duchess or the Garden of Déduit in Le Roman de la Rose.67 Ekphrasis is a literary device that foregrounds hermeneutics and depends on the play of image as text and vice versa. By converting text into image, then back to text, ekphrasis is an intense condensation of narratives into visual tropes that are instantly recognisable. It creates the literary archive as a spectacle and invites the reader to feel into its collection of aesthetic objects. By crafting an ekphrastic mewe, Canacee immortalises the falcon’s gentil whiteness, encrypted as courtly narrative. Curiously, the Squire’s Tale never quite specifies that Canacee has placed the falcon inside the pen, only that Canacee ‘by hire beddes heed she made a mewe’ (V.643). The emplacement of the bird inside the mewe is enacted by the reader. Perhaps the mewe is never meant for the bird. Rather, Canacee, by crafting the mewe as if she were composing a poem, immemorialises the falcon’s white racial capital, her gentil language, within an ekphrastic hold. Canacee becomes a poetic maker, another falcon. The mewe stands as an authoritative archive vis-​à-​vis the affective hold of the lap. The failure to catch the falcon is an act of violence because an oopsie(!), however unintentional, is a sign of inexcusable negligence and carelessness. The violence of the falcon’s fall, her noncoincidence with Canacee’s lap, registers the violent cunning of

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recognition. Histories fall, but periodisation enfolds; bodies drop, but racialisation extricates. It is not so much difference falling into the life net of recognition as difference failing to enter the net on its own accord. Difference is swept up and enfolded by recognitional logic. Periodisation and racialisation are plagued by misses and false alarms. The real magical object in the Squire’s Tale is the lap, and the real gift is the falcon, the wounded bearer of unbearable whiteness. Race, as a trope of recognition, is a romance object. Whiteness, too, is the hold as a fantasy object.

Half-​told contre-​moves History transforms texts and authors into magical objects; and the interpretive act, rooted in the hermeneutics of empathy, simultaneously recognises and disavows their talismanic sheen. Critics of the Squire’s Tale tend to love one part and hate the other. In fact, much of the critical tradition has treated the tale’s two major sections as discrete units tenuously spliced together. The compartmentalisation of the tale is also a form of periodisation and racialisation. Concerning Part 2, Thomas Warton regretted Chaucer’s ‘tedious detail of the quaint effects of Canace’s ring’; and Morton Bloomfield concludes that the story of the falcon ‘need not detain us long’.68 Part 1, in contrast, has received high praise for its future-​oriented, modernising sensibility as epitomised by the flying brass steed. Magical objects, with their anticipatory allure of the new, gesture towards a modernity still untold. George Nott, in 1815, was convinced that had Chaucer completed the adventures of the brass horse, he ‘would have left us the noblest specimen of romantic imagination to be found within the compass of modern literature’.69 The mechanics of romance, Patricia Ingham contends, ‘[lay] claim to technology by way of a future still in the offing’.70 Part 1, racialised under the sign of Tartary (Wrong Asian) but liberated by critics from the mire of a feminine medieval past (but ok) in Part 2, is unequivocally masculine and modern. What emerges in the critical tradition is a persistent interposition of a period and racial divide between the two parts of the Squire’s Tale. Orientalism, in all its iterations from the medieval to the neoliberal, racialises Part 1. John Mounteney Jephson, in the 1850s,

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interpreted the tale’s exoticism as ‘the fancy of the opium-​eater’.71 Part 2, on the other hand, de-​orientalises and deracialises the tale; race disappears into courtliness, and the medieval is unmarked by race.72 The modernisation of Part 1 is pinned to the medievalisation of Part 2, and the tale reverses its temporal direction. Modernity emerges in hindsight, as the narrative unfolds from Part 1 to Part 2. Chaucer in the Squire’s Tale becomes partitioned, doubled and bitemporal. A transitional Chaucer, spread across a fuzzy period divide, is simultaneously modern and medieval. And the double temporality of Chaucer reflects the double move of periodisation in general. Davis theorises that periodisation ‘results from a double movement, the first a contestatory process of identification with an epoch that it simultaneously constitutes … and the second a rejection of that epoch identified in this reduced, condensed form’.73 Repudiation of a period is counter-​identification, a recursive doubling back to the partition of history. Identification with Part 1 leads to repudiation of Part 2, followed by a recursion to Part 1. The Squire announces his ambitious plan to return to earlier materials from Part 1 before he is interrupted at the beginning of Part 3, thereby leaving his tale half-​untold. Periodisation’s double move typifies the logic of the contre-​ practice. Bernard E. Harcourt, channelling Étienne Balibar, argues that the contre-​move is at the heart of Foucault’s methodology. Throughout his writing, Foucault has proposed various counter-​ practices –​such as counter-​memory, counter-​history and counter-​ conduct –​as a way to combat and think otherwise outside the strictures of Western epistemology and power.74 As Harcourt explains, the contre-​move is not resistance; instead, the contre-​ move as a mode of critique is an intellectual jujitsu, for it ‘engages in a play, a movement, a dance with its object, using the force of the object against itself, in order to get beyond that game’.75 The contre-​move is then liberated from and exceeds the game, at which point it is no longer counter to the original opposition but is its own autonomous entity. Crucially, the contre-​practice always ‘indexes its former counter-​partner’.76 The relationship between the two moves is not causal; as Arnold Davidson explains, there is a ‘tactical immanence’ between a move and its countermove, for the two share elements that could be utilised and reutilised by either or

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both.77 Wrong Asian, for instance, turns the cunning of neoliberal racial logic on its head and enacts a contre-​move that recognises the misrecognition, while indexing the original classificatory schema of inclusive exclusion. But if the contre-​ move seemed progress friendly, Harcourt warns against any romantic attachment, for it is not dialectical: ‘Neither inherently good nor bad, it can take us in multiple directions’.78 In fact, the contre-​move can fail. Literary interpretation and reappropriation are contre-​practices, and Chaucerism post-​Chaucer is a study in textual reception as a periodising act. In The Temple of Glass, John Lydgate’s dreamer–​ narrator enters a crystalline sanctum, where he beholds ‘uppermore depeint men myghte se /​Hou with hir ring goodli Canacé /​Of everé foule the ledne and the song /​Coud undirstond as she welk hem among’ [farther up set among stars men might see /​How the beautiful Canacé with her ring /​Of every bird’s language and song /​Could understand, as she walked among them].79 Lydgate immortalises the Squire’s Tale by turning it into an ekphrastic image-​text among the glassy walls. The temple is Lydgate’s mewe, a literary archive. And by placing Chaucer within a hold, Lydgate strategically periodises him as a poet of the past. Two hundred years later, John Milton alludes to Chaucer in Il Penseroso as ‘him that left half-​told /​The story of Cambuscan bold … And of the wondrous horse of brass, /​On which the Tartar king did ride’.80 By designating the Squire’s Tale as definitively ‘half-​ told’, Milton critiques Chaucer’s work as admirable yet incomplete; at the same time, Milton prizes the aborted tale as more impressive for the sheer potential it holds, its promise of future greatness, precisely because it is left unfinished. Among early modern English writers, such as Edmund Spenser and Milton, there is a propensity towards treating the Squire’s Tale as a convenient stand-​in for ‘Chaucer’. This may seem surprising to postmodern critics, many of whom would hesitate to appraise the tale as representative of the best of Chaucer. To the early modern, however, Chaucer was the father, master and purifier of the English language. William Caxton praises Chaucer as the ‘first foundeur and embelissher of ornate eloquence in our English’.81 Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, pays tribute to ‘Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled’.82 Anticipating Milton, Spenser blames ‘wicked Time’ for having ‘robd the world of threasure endlesse

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deare’, that is, the missing fragments of the Squire’s Tale.83 More than a supersessionary typology, the making of literary genealogy is a jockeying race among post-​medieval authorial selves vis-​à-​vis Chaucer. To become Chaucer(ian) is to become periodised. Behaving almost like an Austinian performative, Milton’s judgement gives the ‘half-​told’ existence through poetic utterance. The half-​told is also a critical countermove to Chaucer’s original act of composition. By making a countermove on Chaucer’s tale, Milton gives shape to the ‘half-​untold’ (or the ‘contre-​told’) that cannot be found yet will forever index the half-​told. Milton interposes a period divide between what is here and what is not here but should be –​the ‘half-​untold’, the spectral, phantasmagorical object –​that shimmers at the edge of futurity. It is the fallen falcon that lies aswoon, dead and like a stone, waiting for someone to scoop it up. The half-​untold is a virtual recursion, a self-​referential repetition without the same.84 Milton has created a phantom limb that cannot be severed from the Squire’s Tale. It is best that Chaucer had never written the missing parts; completing it would have taken away the modernising potential of his text. The post-​Chaucer history of the Squire’s Tale has a built-​in periodisation: the half-​told medievalises the narrative, while the half-​untold modernises it through endless deferral and anticipation. The periodising impulses of the untold contre-​move are symptomatic of modernity as a project that is incomplete (à la Jürgen Habermas) and unfulfillable (à la Bruno Latour).85 The logic of the half-​told anchors the denial of history and of race to the Middle Ages: their presence in premodernity would be considered anachronistic. In this sense, anachronism has a periodising function. But as de Grazia argues, a sense of anachronism, which is not the same as an error of anachronism, provides the requisite temporal and cultural distance for the birth of historical consciousness, an awareness that one’s own epoch is unlike another. Alienation, not historical empathy, is the effect. Difference is temporalised, spatialised and estranged. As the logic goes, the Renaissance, imbued with a sense of anachronism, recognises itself as distinct from antiquity and from the Dark Ages.86 Anachronism sharpens temporal edges, and a sense of anachronism is equated with a sense of history. The Middle Ages, according to this passing narrative, is without history.87 To Erwin Panofsky, the lack of perspectival space

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in medieval art translates into the lack of temporal distance, hence history itself, in the Middle Ages.88 Ironically, the very notion that the Middle Ages is without historical consciousness depends on the logic of periodisation: the splice of absence and presence plotted along a temporal axis. Similarly, the recalcitrant belief that the Middle Ages is without race is also predicated on the logic of periodisation.89 If difference is distance and estrangement, and racial estrangement is impossible without modern biopolitics or racial capitalism, then a Middle Ages without history is also one without race.90 Just as a Middle Ages without history activates the partition of time, so does a Middle Ages without race license the sorting out of bodies into an unracialised premodernity or a racialised modernity. The medieval-​ modern divide never operates on a straightforwardly binaristic, oppositional logic. The neat allocation of absence/​ presence according to any fixed pattern does not quite work out most of the time. Branded as medieval, the half-​told Squire’s Tale as a historical artefact may signal, in some historiographic circles, the absence of historicity and racialicity. Nor is the medieval–​modern divide always dialectical (the residual and the emergent) or typological. The periodising function of the epochal divide might best be described as contre-​modal. The contre-​practice is not dialectics. Partitions are duplications, and the vanquished is continuously indexed. Curiously, in matters of race, there is no equivalent critical term to anachronism; no one has yet analysed a sense of ‘anaracialism’ in premodernity as evidence for the absence of race in the period. That is, anaracialism as racial consciousness produced by an awareness of racial difference –​‘my race is not your race’ –​might be analogous to anachronism’s operative sense of ‘my period is not your period’. In this sense, anaracialism (as racial distance and estrangement) might be the opposite of cross-​ racial empathy. The uneven theorisation of periodisation and race suggests that the two cannot and should not be easily analogised.

Non-​figural implications The half-​told is a racial and temporal hold. Historical periods, Nigel Smith observes, ‘Are time shapes. They can be rounded or linear, with beginnings and endings’.91 Indeed, figural thinking has had

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a tyrannical grip on the conceptualisation of history in the West. Even Michel Serres’s crumpled handkerchief –​which reimagines time as a foldable sheet rather than as a line, and is where points in time can be brought into close contact or pry far apart –​is but another postmodern lap.92 The questions are: Whose handkerchief is it? And who is doing the folding? The folded handkerchief still delineates a hold for interpellation, an interiorised vessel for subjectivity. Figural schemata of time are premised on the recognition logic of interpellation, which is the containerisation of the hold. So much of the periodisation endeavour has been galvanised by the promise, as well as constrained by the dictate, of interpellation –​ the emplacement of proper subject and object within politicised time. Le Goff’s attempt at an objective periodisation of the ‘long’ Middle Ages, like Panofsky’s theory of the twin birth of perspectival space and modern subjectivity in the Renaissance, falls under the regime of interpellation. That figural interpellation exerts so powerful a hold on thinking seems intuitively more obvious in critical race theory than in periodisation studies. Yet in both periodisation and racialisation, maybe what we need is less interpellation and more implication, that sense or feeling of being caught up in something, as a way to break the hold of figural logic. The OED defines implication as ‘the fact of being implied or involved, without being plainly expressed’.93 Sara Ahmed, in her critique of Louis Althusser’s ideological hailing, contends that ‘the recognition of the other as “you there” is a misrecognition which produces the “you” as a subject, and as subject to the very law implicated in recognition’.94 But implication can involve not only the law but also bodies unrecognised or misrecognised by the law. The feeling of implication, Tavia Nyong’o describes, ‘approaches but finally diverges from Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation’; against the ‘you there’ of hailing, implication flags the affective moment of ‘my ears are burning’.95 Implication is counter-​interpellation, not dissimilar to what Moten and Harney call the ‘social capacity’ of the shipped, the containerised, within the hold.96 Or, implication is ‘a feel for feeling others feeling you’.97 It is the capacity for a different historicity or racialicity, a way to avoid the cunning of interpellation. Wrong Asian marks the racialised subject as implicated but not recognised. Whose ears should be burning now?

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Fredric Jameson’s directive, ‘We cannot not periodize’, already seems a little dated in its hortatory articulation and is therefore self-​periodising.98 Adopting a Sedgwickian pose, I ask: Cannot not periodise?99 For Jameson, periodisation is a kind of gravity well that exerts a dialectical shock on the now; it wields indexical power and has local validity.100 Yet, as I have argued, periodisation is not always or necessarily dialectical; rather, it is sometimes contre-​ modal. The experience of history is not the experience of periodisation. Periodisation, after all, is a trope and a performative; as such, periodisation is a magical object. Likewise, the experience of lived sociality is not the experience of racialisation. Racialisation too can be a magical object, a figural trope. The lap of whiteness as one figuration of the premodern hold may offer empathic entry and interpellation, but such promises are at best partial and at worst illusory. If we must periodise and racialise, we would do well to remember that both are techniques of passing in which interpellation is provisional, and implication is the name of the game. *** Channelling Raymond Williams and others, Kelly A. Gates has asserted that ‘technologies are thoroughly cultural forms from the outset, embodying the hopes, dreams, desires, and especially the power relations and ideological conflicts of the societies that produce them’.101 If white*ness is somatechnical, then its operations are cultural forms. This study has examined three operations of premodern whiteness: fragility, precarity and racialicity. White fragility characterises the psychoanalytics of courtly love, especially that of the spectral economy of loss and desire, and the formation of white masculine subjectivity; white precarity indexes the deformational violence of cultural aestheticisation beneath the veneer of consumerist comfort and affective normalcy, as well as the vulnerability of the Christian body politic rendered invisible through the precaritisation of medieval Jews; and white racialicity marks the technologies of enfleshment, formations of power and the politics of recognition at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment. Whiteness is inclusive of the body but also the flesh, the animate but also the inanimate, the human but also the technological, the cultural but also the aesthetic and the biopolitical but also the geontopolitical.

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In the conclusion, I return to whiteness as a modern racial category and consider the commingling and congealment of fragility, precarity and racialicity under late liberal capitalism. While this study has actively advocated the unseeing of premodern critical whiteness studies as exclusively a racial phenomenon, it nonetheless recognises a radical difference between the modern and the premodern condition, in spite and because of temporal gaps, cultural-​historical differences and effects of period balkanisation. Namely, in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, there has been a wilful weakening and erasure of the liberatory potential of the asterisk in ‘white*’ through the repurposing, hardening, and delimiting of the medieval as exclusively the inherited property of the white race. Through the trope of environmentality as both world and metaphor, late liberal white supremacist medievalism stalls the vibrant, heterogeneous operation of the asterisk, eradicates its capacious potentiality and converts ‘white*’ into ‘white’ as strictly a racial signifier.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–​1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 77. 2 Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), p. 5. 3 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), pp. 87–​99. See also Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, ‘Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney’, Social Text, 36:3 (2018), 95–​110. 4 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 93. 5 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). See the foundational study by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–​1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). See also Kathleen Biddick, ‘Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 35–​52; and Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

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6 Akbari notes the ‘casual’ uses of medieval orientalism in Idols in the East, p. 6. 7 Susan Crane, ‘For the Birds’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 32. 8 ‘PCRS’ is coined by Margo Hendricks, in ‘Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race’, The Folger Institute (5 September 2019). https://​www.fol​ger.edu/​instit​ute/​scholarly-​programs/​race-​periodization/​ margo-​hendricks (accessed on 1 May 2020). 9 Suzanne Keen, ‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, Narrative, 14:3 (2006), 208. 10 See Lauren Wispé, ‘History of the Concept of Empathy’, in Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (eds), Empathy and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 34. 11 Theodor Lipps, ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-​Feelings’, trans. Max Schertel and Melvin Rader, in Melvin Rader (ed.), A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 3rd edn, 1960), p. 381. 12 Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (New Haven, NT: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 23. 13 Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 198. 14 Ibid., p. 198. 15 Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. ix. 16 Edward Bradford Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 417 n.1. 17 Karl F. Morrison, ‘I Am You’: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 34. 18 See Morrison, Hermeneutics of Empathy, pp. xxv, 34 and 40. 19 Morrison, Hermeneutics of Empathy, p. 34. 20 Dyan Elliott warns that an unqualified historical empathy is not a good thing for the field. See Dyan Elliott, ‘Historical Faith/​Historian’s Faith’, Religion & Literature, 42:1–​2 (2010), 247–​52; and Barbara Newman, ‘Coming Out of the (Sacristy) Closet’, Religion & Literature, 42:1–​2 (2010), 279–​97. 21 Nicholas Watson, ‘Desire for the Past’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 21 (1999), 60–​1, 85. 22 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edn, 1987). Citations by line numbers. 23 Suzanne Keen, ‘Empathy Studies’, in David H. Richter (ed.), A Companion to Literary Theory (Oxford: Wiley, 2018), p. 131.

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24 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 25 Ibid., pp. 134–​7. 26 The lappe could be ‘a folded or extended skirt’, ‘a person’s lap’ or ‘bosom’. See MED, s.v. ‘lappe’, 2, 4 and 5. 27 I adapt the concept from Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 28 Prose translation in B. A. Windeatt (trans.), Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1982), pp. 26–​40; lap episode on pp. 39–​40. 29 Steven F. Kruger, ‘Dream Inheritance’, in Erin Felicia Labbie (ed.), Glossing Is Glorious: The Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics of Commentary, forthcoming. 30 Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Withdrawal and Regression’, in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1958), pp. 255–​61. 31 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity’, in Michael N. Forster (ed. and trans.), Herder: Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 292. 32 Translation in Frank R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 120. 33 Jeff Rider, ‘The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past’, in Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferré and Alicia Montoya (eds), Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), p. 156. 34 See Kimberly Chabot Davis, Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-​Racist Reading (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014); and Alisha Gaines, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 35 Keen, ‘Empathy Studies’, p. 127. 36 Margreta de Grazia, ‘Anachronism’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 13. 37 Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? trans. M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. x. For a history of periodisation, see Lawrence Besserman, ‘The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives’, in Lawrence

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Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 3–​27. 38 Le Goff, Must We Divide History, p. 111. 39 Brian Cummings, ‘Autobiography and the History of Reading’, in Cummings and Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations, p. 638. David Matthews, ‘Periodization’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013), p. 260. 40 See, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Lee Patterson, ‘The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages’, in Besserman (ed.), Challenge of Periodization, pp. 51–​66. 41 Kathleen Davis, ‘Theory in Time’, PMLA, 130:3 (2015), 763. 42 See Kristen Poole and Owen Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Kristen Poole and Owen Williams (eds), Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth-​ Century England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 8. 43 Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Modern Divide: From Either Side’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37:3 (2007), 457. 44 Ania Loomba, ‘Periodization, Race, and Global Contact’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37:3 (2007), 598. 45 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 65; and Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-​Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 3 and 6. 46 Julie Cary Nerad, ‘Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America’, in Julie Cary Nerad (ed.), Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–​2010 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 9. 47 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 48 Wald, Crossing the Line, p. 7. 49 Le Goff, Must We Divide History, pp. 2 and 114. 50 This is not always the case in medieval representations, in which Tartars are sometimes depicted as monstrous cannibals. See Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 81–​104; and Geraldine

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Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 120–​3, 165–​7. 51 I would like to thank Jonathan Hsy for introducing me to Linh-​Yen Hoang’s work. 52 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 17. 53 For cross-​race recognition deficit (CRRD), see Thao B. Nguyen, Kathy Pezdek and John T. Wixted, ‘Evidence for a Confidence-​Accuracy Relationship in Memory for Same-​and Cross-​Race Faces’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70:12 (2017), 2518–​34. 54 Tamar Szabó Gendler, ‘On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias’, Philosophical Studies, 156:1 (2011), 47. 55 Daniel Sharfstein argues that ‘race is a conceptual blur’ in ‘Frizzly Studies: Negotiating the Invisible Lines of Race’, Common Knowledge, 19:3 (2013), 521. 56 Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, et al., ‘Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain’, Science, 303 (2004), 1157. 57 See Sara Gutmann, ‘Chaucer’s Chicks: Feminism and Falconry in “The Knight’s Tale”, “The Squire’s Tale”, and The Parliament of Fowls’, in Carolynn Van Dyke (ed.), Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 69–​83. 58 Madeline Caviness, ‘From the Self-​Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’, Different Visions, 1 (2008), 1. 59 Ibid., 23, 27–​29. 60 See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 61 For illustrations of the Canacee–​ falcon scene, see Kenneth Bleeth (ed.), Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Physician’s Tales: An Annotated Bibliography 1900 to 2005 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 34–​59. 62 Charles Cowden Clarke, Tales from Chaucer, in Prose (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833), p. 211. 63 F. J. Harvey Darton, The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims: Retold from Chaucer and Others (New York: Stokes, 1914), p. 168. 64 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 8.

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65 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Simply Marvelous’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004), 6. 66 MED, s.v. ‘shapen’, 2(b). 67 For Canacee’s mewe, see Crane, ‘For the Bird’, 37–​41; Lesley Kordecki, ‘Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Animal Discourse, Women, and Subjectivity’, Chaucer Review, 36:3 (2002), 289–​94; and Sara Deutch Schotland, ‘Avian Hybridity in ‘The Squire’s Tale’: Uses of Anthropomorphism’, in Van Dyke (ed.), Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, pp. 115–​30. 68 Thomas Warton’s quote in Donald C. Baker, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, OK: Oklahoma Press, 1990), 2:60; Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Renaissance’, Poetica, 12 (1981), 32–​3. 69 George Nott, quoted in Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–​1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 2:79–​80. 70 Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 115. 71 John Mounteney Jephson, quoted in Robert Bell (ed.), Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), 1:462. 72 See Angela Jane Weisl, Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 50–​69; and Michael Murrin, Trade and Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 43–​61. 73 Kathleen Davis, ‘Sovereign Subjects, Feudal Law, and the Writing of History’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36:2 (2006), 230. 74 For critique of Foucault’s reinscription of linear teleology, see Loomba, ‘Periodization, Race’, 601; and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’, Political Power and Social Theory, 11 (1997), 188 and 191. 75 Bernard E. Harcourt, ‘Contre-​/​Counter-​ ’, in Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris and Jacques Lezra (eds), Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), p. 77. 76 Ibid., p. 76. 77 Arnold I. Davidson, ‘In Praise of Counter-​Conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, 24:4 (2011), 27. 78 Harcourt, ‘Contre-​/​Counter-​’, 81. 79 John Lydgate, The Temple of Glass, ed. J. Allan Mitchell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), lines 137–​ 40. My translation.

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80 John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (New York: Penguin, 1998), lines 109–​15. 81 W. J. B. Crotch (ed.), The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, EETS no. 176 (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1978), p. 36. David Lawton argues that Spenser and Milton view Chaucer as the father of the English epic, in his Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), pp. 117–​23. See also Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-​Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–​ 21; and Samantha Katz Seal, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 1–​24. 82 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 1992), IV.ii.32.8. Citations by line numbers. 83 Ibid., IV.ii.33.1–​4. 84 William Kuskin defines recursion as ‘a trope of return that produces representation through embedded self-​ reference’, in Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), p. 9. 85 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity –​An Incomplete Project’, in Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/​Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 127. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 46–​8. 86 De Grazia, ‘Anachronism’, p. 26. 87 See Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 10; and Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Arnold, 1969), p. 1. 88 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 106; and Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), p. 51. 89 See Peter Biller, ‘Proto-​racial Thought in Medieval Science’ in Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler and Miriam Eliav-​Feldon (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 157–​80; and Joseph Ziegler, ‘Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-​ racism 1200–​1500’ in Isaac, Ziegler and Eliav-​Feldon (eds), Origins of Racism, pp. 181–​ 99. See also David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Nirenberg’s anti-​prescriptivist agnosticism treats race as strictly an idea. In general critical race studies, the denial of premodern race persists. See George

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M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 26. 90 For critique of the erasure of race in the Middle Ages, see Heng, The Invention of Race, pp. 20–​1. On blackness and the Middle Ages, see Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​ Thinking (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 91 Nigel Smith, ‘Time Boundaries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies’, in Poole and Williams, Early Modern Histories of Time, p. 38. 92 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 57–​60. 93 OED, s.v. ‘implication’, 2(a). 94 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-​ Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 23. 95 Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Trapped in the Closet with Eve’, Criticism, 52:2 (2010), 244. 96 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 93. 97 Ibid., p. 98. 98 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2012), p. 29. 99 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s response, ‘Always historicize?’ to Jameson’s admonishment, ‘Always Historicize’, is a classic contre-​move. Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 125. 100 Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 134. I would like to thank Noah Guynn for his insights. 101 Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 4.

Conclusion: White environmentality

[W]‌hat are the means of counting costs? And who is not a breather? –​Timothy K. Choy1 [P]‌olitics is swiftly becoming something that is inhaled, rather than something that occurs on the ground. –​Marjin Nieuwenhuis2

Before and before Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in The Undercommons, point to the inversion of aggression and self-​defence in the history of cinematic representations of colonial settlement: In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by ‘natives’, inverting … the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-​defense. Indeed, aggression and self-​ defense are reversed in these movies, but the image of a surrounded fort is not false. Instead, the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath –​before and before –​enclosure. The surround antagonises the laager in its midst while disturbing those facts on the ground with some outlaw planning.3

With their guns pointing outward, the settlers recast themselves as victims of native aggression that surrounds the fort. Yet who exactly needs protection from whom? It is the surround that has

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suffered violent dispossession. The recasting of aggression as self-​ defence is a manoeuvre of white fragility that is the fort. Blackness is the before of racial capitalism that institutionalised and inscribed certain bodies as ‘black’. And Blackness is the before of settler colonial usurpation that reduced flesh to a source of labour to produce property and capital. As a sociality, a way of being and gathering, Blackness is the before of governmentality that individuated beings into illusory subjects, which are then accessed, commodified, exploited and put to death. Blackness is the before of the ruse of recognition.4 The ‘before and before’ is both temporal and spatial. The before is temporal antecedence; the before is also what stands before us, here and now. To face what stands before us is to turn around, performing a dorsal turn that technologises and humanises. However, what stands before us also conjures the admonition, ‘Watch your back’. What does our back face? The fort or the surround? ‘Before and before’ is a diacritical operation: before the asterisk, in the signifier ‘white’; but also before the prefix, in the blank space that is not a void. Before and before is a turn, or a double dorsal turn. The asterisk is a hinge, a nexus and an environment. The antagonism between the fort and the surround that Moten and Harney describe is fundamentally an environmental one, and the surround at first appears to stand in for the environment. This turn to the environmental is a turn to not only biopower but geontopower, for the environment is constituted by the animate and the inanimate. Tracing and explicating the untold history of geontopolitics in the West, Elizabeth A. Povinelli concludes that the overt biopolitical tactics of settler colonialism has long been buttressed by the logic of a covert geontopolitics: ‘The attribution of an inability of various colonized people to differentiate the kinds of things that have agency, subjectivity, and intentionality of the sort that emerges with life has been the grounds of casting them into a premodern mentality and a postrecognition difference’.5 I would further extend Povinelli’s insight and argue that contemporary white supremacy appropriates a similar bio-​/​geontopolitical ideology that casts whiteness as both premodern innocence and post-​racial purity –​whiteness as a racial category and as a code for a pristine environment under threat from non-​white pollution and destruction. As I discuss below, racialist environmentalism assumes

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the guise of a retro-​futuristic medievalism, which is an articulation of settler late liberalism. In the inversion of the fort and the surround, the environment is split into environmentalism (conservation and protection) and environmentality (bio-​and thanatopolitics); the environment is both world and metaphor. Whiteness is no longer limited to the fort; rather, diffusion and indistinction now characterise racialised whiteness. Whiteness is still under siege at the fort and in permanent need of self-​defence; but whiteness is also the surround as white property, the bio-​geontopolitical resource in need of protection. The hardening of modern whiteness into racialism and racism is coextensive with the delimiting of the medieval into medievalism. ‘White*’, a capacious placeholder for all sorts of premodern formations of power, is reduced to ‘white’, a carceral hold for the late capitalist logistics of race.

The whiteness surround What is the terrorist assemblage of white supremacy in the West today?6 Specifically, what is the medievalism practised by, and which in turn shapes, the racist machine of violence? In a viral photograph –​a terrorist assemblage –​Peter Cvjetanovic unwittingly became the face of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. His face, read as white and male, is the default of much of the West’s facial recognition technology; yet what is recognised as the norm, in this paradigmatic instance, is racial terror as the default of this particular form of whiteness. Or, whiteness as death. Torch in hand and teeth bared, Cvjetanovic proclaims a racialist sovereignty that locates him simultaneously within the nation-​state and without it. He becomes, through his speech act, a non-​state actor capable of terror, who nonetheless claims the rights of a sovereign subject of a nation-​state.

Catastrophic identity The triangular insignia on Cvjetanovic’s shirt, the dragon’s eye, marks him as a member of the college-​focused white nationalist group Identity Evropa (rebranded in March 2019 as ‘American Identity Movement’). Founded in 2016 by the ex-​US Marine Nathan

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Figure 7.1  Peter Cvjetanovic. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA on 11 August 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/​Anadolu Agency/​ Getty Images. By permission. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.)

Damigo, Identity Evropa is a self-​described fraternity that models itself after the European Identitarian movement that emerged in the early twenty-​ first century, especially the French Génération identitaire (2002). While in Charlottesville 2017, members of Identity Evropa did not put on explicitly medievalised costumes or wield shields emblazoned with medieval symbols as did other white supremacist groups; their ideology, in fact, is informed by specific permutations of medievalism, some of which galvanise and license acts of violence. For instance, Markus Willinger, an Austrian Identitarian, published in 2013 a manifesto titled Generation

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Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers. A conduct manual for young white men, Willinger’s text resorts to clichés of courtly love as a paradigm for the proper relationship between the sexes: ‘Men want to win a woman who is worth the effort and the  trials they must endure, for whom the leap through the fire and the battle with the dragon are worth it’.7 If Willinger’s rhetoric seemed like that of an immature and angry college freshman, the deliberate ‘bro’ affectation he puts on is quite a sophisticated performance. His is an intentionally dumbed-​down, popularised version of the more sophisticated right-​wing philosophy propping up Identitarianism.8 Identitarian ideology is explicitly grounded in the work of Guillaume Faye, one of the key intellectuals of the French New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. Until the early twenty-​first century, Faye was largely unknown to North American conservatives. But this changed in 2009 when Arktos Media began to publish English translations of his work. What American white supremacists find in Faye is a pan-​Europeanism that is easily adoptable. In his Foreword to the 2012 English publication of Faye’s 2004 Convergence of Catastrophes, Jared Taylor emphasises that ‘the struggle to save Europe is the struggle to save America’.9 Before its website was taken down, Identity Evropa proudly cited Faye on its webpage ‘Action Report’.

Figure 7.2  ‘Action Report’, Identity Evropa. (Online.)

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Identity, in Faye’s formulation, is biological, incomparable and irreplaceable: without a people’s identity, ‘culture and civilization are unsustainable’.10 Co-​opting the language of and articulating the familiar grievance against identity politics, Faye’s strategy rests on the assumption that European whites have been denied the right to have an ‘identity’, which hitherto has been set aside exclusively for non-​whites. The blood-​and-​soil metaphor of Nazi necropolitics is repackaged as Identitarian ‘enrootment’, an ‘[a]‌ttachment to a land, to a hereditary heritage, and to an identity that is the motor of all historical dynamism’.11 Instead of advocating for a ‘white Europe’, Faye urges Europeans to fight for an ethnosphere ‘infused with ideas of identity and continuity’.12 Sidestepping explicit dermal racialism, Faye theorises identity as a sovereign, enrooted geopolitical bloc. The American Identity Movement similarly conceptualises Identitarianism as the ‘preservation of America’s historical demographics’.13 The polemical sleight of hand allows for easy mainstreaming and thereby dissemination of ideas, targeting specifically the crypto-​racists in the closet. Faye provides a veneer of faux intellectualism that does not alienate its non-​academic audience but rather offers an ideological grounding that rivals those of the political centre or left. Central to Faye’s Identitarianism is the urgency of an impending apocalypse, a time–​space acceleration of large-​scale destructions caused by environmental, financial and human actors, all of which would result in the racial extinction of whiteness. As Mike Hill points out, the temporality of white supremacy is deliberately retro-​ futuristic: it simultaneously deploys nostalgia for a pure(r) racialised past, invokes its threatened status in the present and foresees its future extinction.14 For Faye, neoliberalism has created converging lines of ‘catastrophes’ in the social world. Among Faye’s list of clear and present dangers are the cancerisation of the European social fabric, global economic and demographic crises, chaos in the global South, religious fanaticism (i.e. Islamic militancy) and uncontrolled pollution across the planet. By linking a besieged white identity to contemporary crises of sustainability, Faye not only participates in but also co-​opts the discourse of precarity that informs current critical conversations in ecocritical sciences and environmental humanities. Saving the white race is good for the environment.

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On social media, Identity Evropa members aggressively marketed themselves as conscientious environmental activists who practised a brand of anti-​immigrant, white environmentalism. From cleaning a neglected Confederate cemetery in Florida to picking up trash on a California beachfront, Identitarians carefully burnished their brand’s public image in ways that disarmed suspicion and elicited empathy to their cause. In their 4 December 2017 tweet, ‘Southern California Beach Cleanup’, Identity Evropa explicitly linked human survival to planetary survival: A core aspect of Identitarianism is the connection between a people and their land. In order to ensure the health and prosperity of future generations, we believe it is essential to respect and care for our planet. And in an age where the Earth is exploited and polluted for

Figure 7.3  ‘Southern California Beach Cleanup’, Identity Evropa, 4 December 2017. (Online.)

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the benefit of international elites, environmental activism is as necessary as ever. Moreover, proponents of mass immigration recklessly propose that all of the global poor be allowed to enter Western nations and enjoy Western lifestyles –​lifestyles, which, as we all know, leave a heavy environmental footprint.15

The tweet deploys a red herring mea culpa on Western lifestyles yet implicitly recognises an evaluative hierarchy pitting Western against non-​ Western carbon footprints. Furthermore, the evocation of transnational elitism conjures up ‘cosmopolitanism’; both are anti-​ Semitic dog whistles appealing to the Far Right. For Faye, the elites are ‘a clan (sociological or ethnic) … [characterised by] the ability to make money’, and cosmopolitanism promotes a racially ‘mixed world’ against identity.16 Identity Evropa’s beach clean-​up thereby enacts enrootment, which ‘opposes cosmopolitanism [and] cultural mixing’.17 The ecological imperative, for Faye, is premised on the desire to preserve human societies and not the environment for its own sake. Ecologism, in contrast, is ‘a front to conceal Trotskyism’s cosmopolitan agenda’.18 Cleaning up the Earth is code for purging America of its non-​white inhabitants who pollute the Identitarian ecology by their very presence. In Charlottesville 2017, the efforts to preserve white history, land and people converged in the fight over a statue of Robert E. Lee, the mythologised soldier-​ saint of the Confederacy. The medievalism of the South’s mythography –​especially the codification of chivalry and courtly love –​is well documented. Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, calls R. E. Lee ‘the mystic White Knight of the Round Table’.19 Ravaged by the Civil War, the South lay in ruin; the destructions it suffered were cultural, economic and environmental. For white Southerners, such as the writer Sidney Lanier, the Middle Ages provided a way to grasp and reconcile violence, defeat and industrial capitalism.20 What is important in the imaginative acts of cultural appropriations is the deep connection between Southern medievalism and environmentalism. That is, a medievalised environmentality facilitated a racialised nostalgia for a pre-​War, agrarian pastoralism.

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The history of nineteenth-​century ecomedievalism is inseparable from the history of racialist nativism, both of which would later merge with ecofascism in the twentieth century.21 In its American iteration, Identitarianism, while claiming a pan-​European heritage, draws on the history of environmental conservation in the United States, especially the nativist tradition advocated by the likes of Madison Grant and Teddy Roosevelt. Grant, who promoted harsh immigration restrictions based on scientific racism, saw no contradiction in championing both nature conservation and eugenics; for him, the Middle Ages signifies the resilience of the Nordic Race and prefigures their conquest of North America in modernity. Grant, like Faye, has experienced a resurgence of popularity in the twentieth-​first century. In 2013, Richard Spencer wrote a new foreword to Grant’s 1933 The Conquest of a Continent, or, The Expansion of Races in America. Grant, in Spencer’s assessment, ‘sought to defend and conserve his people, his class, and his way of life. He defended Nordic America because it was his own’.22 The defence of a racialised class and lifestyle is indistinguishable from the conservation of natural resources. Teddy Roosevelt, who knew Grant, praised R. E. Lee as the paradigm of heroic masculinity.23 By the turn of the twentieth century, the Civil War had in effect been reconceived as the Golden Age of American manhood.24 Significantly, Roosevelt celebrated medieval chivalry, as emblematised in the figure of the aristocratic soldier-​ hunter. He wrote the foreword to the 1909 publication of The Master of Game, an early twentieth-​century facsimile of a medieval hunting manual written by Edward of Norwich in the fifteenth century; the English manuscript, in turn, is itself a translation of Gaston Phoebus’s late fourteenth-​century treatise Livre de chasse.25 In his foreword, Roosevelt portrays American frontiersmen as hunters and celebrates the Middle Ages as the historic zenith of the chase, for hunting is ‘the manliest sport’ and ‘a hardy and vigorous pastime of the kind which makes a people great’.26 As inheritors of the medieval spirit and tradition, white European hunters ushered in Western modernity: ‘the white-​skinned, fair-​haired, blue-​eyed barbarians, who, out of the wreck of the Roman Empire, carved the States from which sprang modern Europe, were passionately devoted to hunting’.27 Paradoxically, ‘hunting-​ while-​ white’ as a

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Figure 7.4  Title page and frontispiece, The Master of Game. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909. Public Domain.)

trope inhabits simultaneously multiple temporalities: it represents one of the cultural achievements of the European Middle Ages; it facilitates the rise of modernity in the West; and it anticipates the birth of the American empire in the New World order. The logic of whiteness warps the logic of periodisation: succession is not temporal but spatial, and progress is nothing other than sameness. The Identitarian strain of environmentalism is the sinister green shadow haunting the history of conservation, as rhetoric of protectionism traffics in both explicit and implicit whiteness. Environmental purity bleeds into racial purity.28 According to Identity Evropa, the only meaningful ways to reduce pollution are to stop American aid to ‘poor’ countries, reduce population in the Third World and restrict immigration into the global North. As Spencer’s website altright.com laments: ‘In the United States, Mexican drug cartels set up growing operations in our national parks. This ends up ruining the local flora and fauna that the park is supposed to protect’.29 The transgressive bad hombres

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are emphatically not the eco-​friendly white hunters of Grant and Roosevelt. ‘A real ecological society’, Faye contends, ‘would obey principles [that maintain] natural equilibriums [and] the ethno-​ cultural homogeneity of the populations’.30 Identitarian environmentalism is nothing but a greenwashed machine of white terror.

Precariat environmentality But if ecofascism and racialist medievalism were nothing new, what is different about the Identitarians is their strain of medievalism, one that is rooted in late capitalist precarity. Identitarian precarity operates in economic and political registers, in addition to that of the environmental. As a recruitment strategy, Identity Evropa targets young white men and exploits their sense of disenfranchisement and perceived threats to their survival (‘catastrophes’), such as immigration, diversity and globalisation. Identitarians are part of what economist Guy Standing labels ‘the precariat’, a neologism fusing the adjective ‘precarious’ and the noun ‘proletariat’. The precariat are not members of any professional community and are characterised by their partial involvement in labour. In Standing’s formulation, the precariat is ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-​and-​pieces lives, in and out of short-​term jobs’.31 Because the precariat has no secure identity, it is ‘at the centre of the turmoil around multiculturalism and personal identities’ in a rapidly globalising world.32 Standing further differentiates the ‘good’ precariat from the ‘bad’ precariat, who are frequently drawn to popular neofascism and indulge in nostalgia for an illusory golden age. At the same time, however, the precariat would like ‘to see the future secured in an ecological way, with the air clean, pollution in retreat and species revived; the precariat has most to lose from environmental degradation’.33 Embodying Faye’s ecology, precariat Identitarianism stands at the precise confluence of ecofascism and white nostalgia. And if globalisation has produced the precariat, it has also uncannily given birth to both the neofascists and antifas. Or, the globalisation that undergirds the state of precarity takes the form of what Hedley Bull would term ‘neomedievalism’: a secular, post-​ sovereign state power structure with overlapping authorities and

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multiple, crisscrossing loyalties to various decentralised, non-​state agents. In place of traditional nation states, the world order is controlled by ‘a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages’.34 In a neomedieval political order, sovereignty is fluid. As Bruce Holsinger elucidates, neomedievalism is characterised by its ‘critical flexibility’ as a metaphor; conceptually, it is useful for understanding postmodern non-​state actors.35 After 9/​11, neomedievalism was co-​opted by the neo-​cons; and the resulting strain of ideology may be called –​a mouthful, that is –​ ‘neoconservative neomedievalism’, in sharp distinction to Bull’s original formulation. The ideological and historical paradox is this: neomedievalism –​ supposedly a theory of the rise of neoliberal globalisation that ushered in the death of nation-​state sovereignty –​in fact, has not killed off the nation-​state. On the contrary, nationalism has witnessed a resurgence that counters the neomedieval world order. However, as Patrick Geary points out in The Myth of Nations, European ethnic nationalism in the post-​Cold War era, with deep roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, also depends on highly selective and warped appropriations of the medieval past. Of particular interest is the period circa 400–​1000, to which various groups lay claim as moments of ‘primary acquisition’, which in turn justify their current claims to sovereignty and rights.36 Wilful ethnogenesis produces and legitimates a seemingly immutable ethnic identity.37 In place of ethnogenesis, Timothy Reuter offers natiogenesis as an alternative lens for understanding premodern group consciousness.38 But in the neomedieval world order, compartmentalisation of ethnicity, nationalism, medievalism and race is impossible if not futile. Faye, too, latches onto the historical significance of the period of migrations in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He insists that Europe at the dawn of the twenty-​first century is a historical ‘counterpoint … to the breakup of the Roman Empire and the slow birth of nations’.39 Parroting late twentieth-​century academic rhetoric in early medieval studies, Faye deploys ‘ethnicity’ for its pseudo-​intellectual cache and participatory aura. But his ‘ethno-​’ neologisms are unambiguous codes for ‘race’: ‘Ethnicity is the sole stable basis of human community, as Claude Lévi-​Strauss argues in Race et histoire’.40 Through the elision of ethnicity and

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race, Faye recalibrates his ‘European nationalism’ to signify white imperialism.41 In fact, he is against local, ethnic separatism: ‘The most dangerous form of enrootment … occurs in the regionalist and separatist milieu of the Left’.42 Whereas Bull’s neomedievalism had been appropriated by the administration of George W. Bush to justify the War on Terror after 9/​11 and to characterise the nature of Islamic threats, the term cannot adequately describe or analyse the terrorist assemblage of Euro-​American white supremacy today. Rather than abandoning sovereignty, Identitarianism reasserts the conflation of national sovereignty with racial sovereignty. Therefore, Identitarian racism, in its attempt to save the land and its people, ultimately manifests itself not so much as environmentalism, in the sense of nature conservation, but as a distorted version of Foucault’s notion of environmentality: that is, a new phase of biopower in the late twentieth century. In his 21 March 1979 lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault traces the origins of modern biopolitics and theorises the rise of new techniques of neoliberalism –​by which he means the American tradition of liberalism –​that he calls ‘environmental technology’ or ‘environmental psychology’: On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-​program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of an internal subjugation of individuals.43

The older technology, the ‘internal subjugation of individuals’, is what Foucault has previously labelled old-​fashioned liberalism’s ‘normative-​ disciplinary system’, a technology of human behaviour.44 Governmentality exercises its disciplinary functions through surveillance, subordination, regulation, classification and normalisation. In the new phase of liberalism, however, governmentality morphs into pre-​emptive environmentality. Identitarianism is one articulation of late liberalism, in which environmentalism is a disguise for environmentality as racialised biopower. Or, Identitarians have enacted a slide between ‘environment’ as world and as metaphor; conceptually, both are deliberately muddled.

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Neoliberalism and neoconservatism converge in the technology of environmentality.45 Identitarianism repurposes both neoliberal and neoconservative apparatus: conservation is good because it pre-​empts the extinction of the white race; environmentality must be deployed to ensure the continuity of racialised governmentality; and the post-​sovereign gives way to the neo-​sovereign condition. ‘The essence of the sovereign function,’ Faye argues, ‘is imperial and organic, based on principles of subsidiarity … a healthy people always finds the sovereignty appropriate to it’.46 Consider two divergent models of environmental medievalism, two paradigms of the sovereign function, which deploy the same medieval trope: Saint Francis of Assisi. In their 2000 Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri invoke Francis as an ante-​type of what they term ‘counter empire’, who, in the face of early capitalism, resisted power through a ‘joyous life [that included] all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans’.47 In their medievalised pastoral, biopower, revolution and community exist in love, simplicity and innocence. In contrast, Faye’s Francis is one of the past heroes of the West for whose legacy the white race must fight and who, in the process, will reanimate the racialist soul of Europe: ‘We fight for a cultural, spiritual rebirth, for a return to the real, to vitality … [W]‌e fight for Achilles, Pericles, and Romulus, for Charles the Hammer and Francis of Assisi –​for the cathedral builders and the rocket scientists’.48 For Faye, as well as Hardt and Negri, Francis embodies the environmentalised sovereignty of the people: for the latter, Francis is a Leftist militant; for the former, an Alt-​Right racialist. Despite their ideological polarities, both versions share the image of Francis as a neomedieval precariat. Thinking back to Charlottesville 2017, I wonder about the sovereign function in the neomedievalised South: What would Francis do? Which Francis?

The archeofuturist Arthur Bull’s 1977 warning against the then emergent neomedieval political order sounds uncannily prophetic in the 2020s: ‘[I]‌f it were anything like the precedent of Western Christendom, [the new world

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order] would contain more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern states system’.49 Out of the convergence of catastrophes, Faye predicts, emerges ‘un Nouveau Moyen Âge’.50 The destructions in the current age herald a new golden age of white environmental medievalism. Warfare is no longer between nations but ‘as it existed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: as the clash between vast ethnic or ethno-​religious blocs’.51 The united Europe will be a ‘neo-​Carolingian community’ where the masses practise ‘a neo-​medieval [néo-​médiéval], quasi-​polytheistic, superstitious and ritualised Christianity’.52 In contrast to Bull’s formulation, Faye’s neomedievalism denotes a sacral, pre-​capitalist imperium of Identitarian bloc in the global North. The New Middle Ages is the culminating vision of Faye’s archeofuturism, the ‘attitude that approaches the future in terms of ancestral values’.53 Archeofuturism is not a regression but an anticipatory restoration, for ‘the year 2050 will resemble the year 500’.54 Historical veracity hardly matters to Faye, for whom the medieval is a convenient ideological vehicle and metaphor for Identitarian sovereignty. Through archeofuturism, white nationalists become medievalised non-​state actors. The universalising white political order is more accurately post-​national, if not transnational. This is the form of Identitarian medievalism in the early twenty-​first century, the precariat assemblage of white terror. Identitarianism constructs white terror as fragile, precarious and in need of protection, all the while wielding violence as a self-​ righteous means of racial control. Part of the continuing culture war in the West centres around the teaching of the literary canon in higher education, and one iconic figure in need of Identitarian protection is the mythical King Arthur, the once and future king of Britain. Signifying the archeofuturism of white supremacy, Arthur becomes the face of white terror. As such, for teacher-​scholars, to engage matters of Arthur is to confront matters of race. It is to enter a fragile atmosphere that sustains a comfort zone of cultural reception for some, but that also creates an unbreathable space of racial violence for others. Since 2015, I have taught Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant in an undergraduate survey of Arthurian literature course, which is open to all students across the disciplines seeking to fulfil their humanities requirements for graduation at a predominantly white

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institution. Over several years, some predictable patterns in the students’ reception to the novel have emerged. The aggregates from course evaluations consistently register a range of responses from eager enthusiasm to tepid indifference, and to overt hostility. On one end of the spectrum, many students loved the novel, likely because of Ishiguro’s artful deployments of cinematic imagery and pacing, the rhythm of which renders the work readily accessible to a generation of digital-​media-​savvy readers. On the other end, a few students expressed outrage at the text. When asked to reflect on the primary texts the class had read, several students unequivocally deemed The Buried Giant inferior to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Whereas one student remarked matter-​of-​factly on the eval (and I paraphrase here), ‘Twain: OK’, right below it is the question, ‘Ishiguro: What’s the point?’ Many academics are well acquainted with snarky student evals.55 And it is perhaps easy to interpret the condescending dismissal of Ishiguro’s novel as symptomatic of the consumerist attitude towards education that characterises students in the post-​1990s neoliberal age. Yet the more I consider the phenomenon over several years, the more I suspect that the hostility towards The Buried Giant cannot simply be attributed to the casual, nonchalant ‘meh’ of students too cool for my course. Nor can it be explained away by the pervasiveness of the culture of online trolling that is transferred to an educational setting. My initial response to a few students’ negative receptions of the novel was not so much anger, for it is a futile emotional drama to be mad at anonymous comments by students no longer in the course. Rather, my affective response was utter astonishment: ‘What?’ How was this possible, after a whole semester in which I painstakingly provided the cultural-​historical contexts to Arthurian texts from the early Middle Ages onward? Have I not charted the contours of British and English histories; the waves of migrations, invasions, settlements and displacements; the complexity of medieval conceptions of race refracted through differences such as descent, language, religion, class and gender; and the emergence of multiple and conflicting figurations of ‘Arthur’ out of competing political forces and interests? Did the class not discuss, over several weeks, Ishiguro’s engagements with racial violence between Britons and Saxons and his wrestling with questions of memory and historical

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trauma in the novel? Was not the ‘point’ of The Buried Giant, even at its most dumbed-​down level tailored for the purpose of examinations, obvious? Then I realised that it is not that I had not gone over historical materials, closely read passages or held discussions in class. It is not even that a few students had not paid attention or skipped class. The utterance, ‘Ishiguro: What’s the point?’ is about something else altogether. The contempt for the novel is not simply due to overt expressions of racism by a few students, though it was certainly there from time to time. Instead, it is the fact that some students and I had been living in parallel universes, or ‘air bubbles’, all semester long, separated by a mist of racialised and racialising difference. There was a complete disconnect among these zones of distinction. We may have shared the same air in the classroom, but that air is differentiated and compartmentalised. Curiously but unsurprisingly, the anti-​Ishiguro students never complained about having to read medieval chronicles. The complaint about Ishiguro is not simply an instance of microaggression in the classroom; and it is not about matters of taste but relevance, about what matters. It is symptomatic of a cultural logic that has turned the Middle Ages and subsequent medievalisms into a racialised heritage under siege. A distorted and ill-​informed notion of the past has thereby authorised some students to defend the Arthurian canon from me. In this universe, Ishiguro, with or without a Nobel Prize, does not belong. The matter of my body and thoughts do not belong. The purified zone, under the sign of ‘Arthur’, exerts a continuous resistance to and wilful dispossession of me and the symbolic system under the sign of ‘Ishiguro’. The zone makes a forceful claim of self-​possession through the violence of a verticality that exerts a deadly gravitational pull. Beneath ‘Twain: OK’, ‘Ishiguro’ hangs like a strange fruit. The Buried Giant is synecdochised into the authorial ‘Ishiguro,’ a sign of the racial other. And beneath ‘Ishiguro’, in the invisible void of a knowledge system that is course evaluation, is ‘I’, the embodiment of the racial other. The mode of course evaluation takes the form of a cultural lynching, the articulated but uninscribed assessment of my course: ‘Kao: no’. I have wasted these students’ time. Is ‘Ishiguro’ the dragon that must be slain?

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Atmoterrorism The Buried Giant opens with a racial utopia set in a magical yet sinister landscape shrouded in mist, with ‘miles of desolate, uncultivated land … rough-​hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland … [and icy] fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land’ (3).56 By all signs, the imagined world is indicative of a civilisation already in decline, where Roman roads and ruins fade into the wilderness. Yet in this hostile environment situated in a fuzzy historical moment sometime after the death of Arthur but before the emergence of an early English national identity, racial harmony exists between the Britons and the Saxons. Peaceful coexistence is possible because no one seems to remember the period of intense racial violence and political turmoil between the two peoples in the not-​so-​distant past, perhaps only a few decades prior to the immediate present in the novel; and the text is wilfully vague about matters of dating and chronology. In a state verging on suspended animation, almost but not quite frozen in time, no one pays much attention to political regimes or cultural discourses. No one seems to remember Arthur at all. The source of the amnesia-​inducing mist plaguing the land, it turns out, is the breath of the she-​dragon Querig that has been put in a permanent comatose state by Merlin’s spell. Concocted by Arthur before his death, the ploy is a desperate attempt to stop the vicious cycles of racial violence between the Saxons and the Britons and to create a post-​ racial society. Decades after Arthur’s passing  and out of the mist of forgetfulness, an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, embark on a journey to find their son, whom they vaguely remember. But they soon discover that the key to the restoration of their memories, which would lead them to their son, lies in the death of the dragon. They are joined on their quest to kill Querig by Wistan, a Saxon warrior, Edwin, a Saxon boy recently bitten by a baby dragon, and an aged yet enigmatic Gawain, the last of the knights of Arthur. By the end of the quest, the group reaches the emaciated Querig in her lair; and Wistan slays both Querig and Gawain, whose true identity is the protector of the dragon. With the mist lifted, memories of past traumas are restored, and the sense

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of racial identities and divisions re-​emerges. Edwin is recruited by Wistan to be trained as a warrior for the impending conquest of Britain by the Saxons. Axl and Beatrice now have full access to their memories but must face the consequences of resurrecting past pains and losses. Since its publication in 2015, Ishiguro’s novel has garnered mixed reception by critics and readers alike. Part of the controversy is due to the inability of readers to identify the precise genre of the text, and the frustration at the novel’s resistance to easy categorisation has led to a devaluation of its aesthetic merits and confusion over its purposes. The Buried Giant is neither a realist novel nor a historical novel.57 It flirts with and strains towards the direction of fantasy, but Ishiguro refuses to take the novel all the way there and to turn it into an epic fantasy. In fact, Ishiguro’s ambivalence towards fantasy –​he characterises the genre as marked by ‘surface elements’ –​has led to a very public tit for tat between himself and Ursula Le Guin, who found reading The Buried Giant a painful experience.58 Addressing questions over the novel’s purposes, Ishiguro claims that the novel is an exploration of the workings of collective memory; specifically, the text examines how a society copes with and recovers from past atrocities (especially war crimes, genocides and acts of racial violence) by forgetting.59 But The Buried Giant offers social critique ever so obliquely, for it is neither an overt social allegory, à la José Saramago, nor a work of antiracist magic realism, à la Toni Morrison. Ishiguro resists setting his novel in a specific, recognisable post-​World War II world in the West, worried that a realistic historical setting might make the work too narrow and political, diminishing its broader appeal and impacts premised on a shared humanist universalism. He eventually settles on an Arthurian ‘England’ not only because, to his delight, the sixth century is practically a blank page in British history, but because Arthur’s England, as depicted in the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a barren, wild and lawless land. On his way to the Green Chapel, Gawain ‘travels through swamps and bog lands, he sleeps exposed to the elements, and he fights –​as if in passing –​dragons, wolves, ogres, bulls and bears’.60 For Ishiguro, the Gawain-​poet’s wild Britain, temporally situated between empires and spatially located at the

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periphery of cosmopolitan centres, is the ideal place for a thought experiment on matters of race. In a way, Ishiguro is right that his novel does not belong properly to fantasy, for traditional fantasy tropes –​such as ogres, pixies and even dragons –​are conspicuously underdeveloped. Magical creatures appear weak, peripheral, spectral and barely animate or sentient. And Merlin, the epitome of Arthurian supernaturalism, is long dead. Instead of reading the novel through fantasy, I want to take seriously Ishiguro’s affinity for the wild and lawless land. The Buried Giant is a form of environmental writing, for the novel is structured around environmental tropes and not those of fantasy. However, though the novel is about a devastating environmental catastrophe, namely the discourse of toxicity, it is not about literal environmental crises per se, such as habitat destruction, environmental pollution or overpopulation, among others. Rather, The Buried Giant is about Foucauldian environmentality –​though not as a distorted version of it co-​opted by Identitarians –​and about how a vertical political regime becomes horizontal. A horizontal environmentality, I contend, accounts for the flatness of the novel’s plot, affects and characters, as well as for the immersive, ambient deployments of the novel’s racial logic. Brian Massumi, in his examination of the neoliberal state’s response to terrorism in the aftermath of 9/​11, argues that the discourse of the War on Terror depends on the conceptualisation of threat as primarily an affect. In other words, threat is conceived as ‘a felt quality’.61 It is understood as an ambient affect that suffuses the lived environment: ‘As presented affectively, its quality suffuses the atmosphere. Threat is ultimately ambient. Its logic is purely qualitative’.62 As a result, the ambient nature of threat justifies the use of pre-​emptive force, in the name of self-​defence, in the same form: ‘[P]‌ re-​ emptive power [becomes] an environmental power. Rather than empirically manipulate an object (of which actually it has none), it modulates felt qualities infusing a life-​environment’.63 Massumi’s analysis of pre-​emptive power as environmental power builds on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and regimes of security. One way to grasp the systemic shift described by Foucault is through the history of terrorism. Modern terrorism, Peter Sloterdijk argues, ‘suspends the distinction between violence against persons

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and violence against things from the environment –​it is violence against those human-​surrounding “things” without which persons cannot remain persons’.64 Whereas governmentality disciplines individual bodies and subjectivities, environmentality targets the milieu surrounding these embodied identities. In The Buried Giant, the endless cycle of racial violence between the Saxons and the Britons, in the name of vengeance, has become a permanent feature of everyday life during Arthur’s reign. The threat of racial violence is ambient, environmental. In his attempt to stop the cycle of violence, impose peace between the warring races and restore social order, Arthur commands Merlin to cast a spell on the dragon Querig, whose breath, in the form of a mist that envelopes the entire island, suppresses the long-​term memory of the populace. Almost all the Britons and Saxons live in a state of amnesia, with their short-​term memory lasting no more than a few hours at best.65 Arthur, in effect, deploys a pre-​emptive strike. He fights the threat of continuing violence with a violent act, as psychological manipulations and cognitive modifications are also forms of violence. Significantly, Arthur and Merlin impose a political regime that resembles Foucault’s environmental technocracy in which systems of difference are optimised (the peaceful cohabitation of the Britons and the Saxons), minority individuals and practices are tolerated, and intervention is environmental in nature. The mechanism of environmentality in The Buried Giant, by which the state acts on its subjects’ milieu, is toxicity. As Mel Y. Chen argues, toxicity is a figure of the scapegoat that emerges during times of social unrest, economic instability and collective anxiety over transnational flow.66 A discursive metaphor, toxicity plays a crucial role in shaping the rhetoric of danger, crisis and precarity, especially concerning differences of race, nation, gender and sexuality. Toxins, Chen contends, ‘participate vividly in the racial mattering of locations, human and nonhuman bodies, living and inert entities, and events such as disease threats’.67 Toxicity demarcates the biopolitical zones of the dead and the living. For instance, in 2007, lead became a major concern as a toxin in the US media. Toys made in China were perceived to contain dangerous levels of lead on their painted surfaces, despite the difficulty of tracing or identifying the lead toxin on the toys. One icon under the

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threat of lead poison was Thomas the Tank Engine, a fetishised object marking white, middle-​class status and explicitly connected to the proper masculine development of boys. Chen argues that during the media frenzy, toxicity rendered the sexualised body of the child as vulnerable and the racialised body of the inanimate toy as threatening. In this case, the panic surrounded lead-​tainted products, especially toys, that were made in China then sold in the West. Lead was racialised as a Chinese toxin, which could enter the environment and be readily ingested by the Child. In other words, toxicity had become environmental. The state of political turmoil in The Buried Giant necessitates the emergence of toxicity as a racialising and hybridising discourse. If the threat of racial violence is a metaphoric toxin, then Arthur is fighting toxicity with toxicity. The dragon makes possible not one but two toxic biopolitical regimes. The first is due to the menacing miasma created by Querig’s breath that enshrouds the entire populace in an airborne epidemic of collective amnesia, in the form of an environmental catastrophe. It is a pre-​emptive biopolitical regime of a deracialised multitude created by Arthur. Yet the absence or forgetting of a conscious racial identity, as a technique of deracialisation, is paradoxically a form of racial control. The second is generated by a baby dragon’s venomous bite that infects Edwin and turns him into a monstrous human-​dragon hybrid. His body, growing ‘ever wilder’ (174), is an accidental biopolitical regime of one. In his 2017 Nobel Lecture, Ishiguro explicitly identifies racism as modernity’s ‘buried monster’: ‘Racism, in its traditional forms and in its modernised, better-​marketed versions, is once again on the rise, stirring beneath our civilised streets like a buried monster awakening’.68 But the giant is not the only figure of racism in The Buried Giant. Carmen-​Veronica Borbely suggests that Querig is ‘the absent centre’ of the narrative, a figure of ‘[the] excess that condenses threats of aggressive dissolution levelled at the body politic and at its collective memory and a beneficent figure of containment that protects, preserves and endlessly defers the assignation of sense to this collective memory’.69 Querig, too, functions as a figure of racism, an absent centre that operates through excess and containment. Arthur’s suppression of individual and collective memories via Querig’s breath is a form of racial control, as he

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substitutes one type of racism (physical violence) for another (psychic violence).70 To both Arthur and Gawain, the dragon’s miasma is a necessary evil for the maintenance of the racial utopia. Querig’s breath works as what Michael Eigen would characterise as ‘toxic nourishment’, a toxin that is used to treat an illness.71 Like chemotherapy, Querig’s breath kills the cancerous memories of racial violence while damaging the collective psyche of the body politic. Air is not a vacuum. Timothy K. Choy observes that ‘[t]‌here is no air in itself; air functions instead as a heuristic with which to encompass many atmospheric experiences’.72 Moreover, for Choy, air never operates only as an object of critique or as a nonhuman materiality; enmeshed in sociality, air is ‘something embodied that engages with humans through bodily practices’.73 Choy’s notion of an airy heuristic is one approach to understanding racial control and violence in The Buried Giant. Racism, in some contexts, is an atmospheric experience; it is more like a mist than a crucible. Ashon T. Crawley, examining the relations between breathing in the African American traditions and white atmospheric regimes, points to breathing as a site of racial politics.74 In The Buried Giant, the dragon’s breath, ostensibly deployed to eliminate racism, in effect functions as another technique of racial violence. Querig’s breath is a biochemical weapon that is airborne; the mist attacks its victims silently and exerts its influence as a slow disaster. The dragon’s lungs have become the literal and figurative lungs of the body politic. As such, the novel is a type of pneumonic fiction. Despite its faux medieval setting, The Buried Giant is emphatically about modern warfare and environmental terrorism. Arthur’s particular form of environmental terrorism, deployed through atmospheric means and respiratory controls that require sufficient exposure and immersion in the toxic medium, is what Sloterdijk terms atmoterrorism. Sloterdijk theorises that twentieth-​ century modernity is characterised by the concomitant emergence and convergence of the new practice of terrorism, the idea of product design and the concept of the environment.75 Culture, for Sloterdijk, is an atmospheric system, and humans are both atmospheric designers and climate guardians. The use of chemical gases in the trenches of World War I in 1915 marked a shift from classical warfare, which has as its target the body of the enemy, to atmospheric

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warfare, which aims at the enemy’s environment. Atmoterrorism is ‘an attack on the enemy’s environment-​dependent vital functions, namely breathing, regulation of the central nervous system and liveable temperature and radiation conditions’.76 The definition of a successful ‘hit’ became hazier and diffused: ‘whatever was close enough to the object could be considered adequately precise and thus operatively controlled’.77 Atmoterrorists turn the enemies’ primal need for air against themselves; the enemies’ reflexive act of breathing leads to their own demise. Contributing to the rise of modern climatology and meteorology, atmoterrorism gave birth to the air force and the weapon industries that design ‘mist-​spreading projectiles’ of gas artillery that would create an ‘unbreathable space’, a gas chamber of the death camp.78 While Borbely argues that Querig is ‘a mere ghost of the past’ and a scapegoat, I contend that Querig, even in her magic-​induced comatose state, is not a passive victim.79 Weaponised by Merlin’s spell, Querig is Arthur’s gas artillery, and her breath, the mist-​spreading projectiles. Just as air is no longer the neutral background in modern atmospheric warfare, it is also front and centre in The Buried Giant. Because of its investments in atmoterrorism and toxicity, Ishiguro’s novel shares certain features with what Priscilla Wald designates as ‘the outbreak narrative’.80 The genre, which Wald argues emerged out of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, follows a formulaic plot: it ‘begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment’.81 The Buried Giant does not follow the generic plot perfectly. It does not begin with an emerging infection, but with the infection having already taken roots decades-​deep in local communities; nor does the novel deploy modern epidemiology. But Ishiguro’s work resembles the outbreak narrative in several key ways: the quest to identify the source of amnesia (Querig), track it down (the journey to the dragon’s lair) and contain it (the slaying of the dragon), in the hope of curing individual cognitive disabilities and the collective consciousness. Though the text does not specify, Querig’s breath, like a contagious pathogen, requires human carriers in order to work its magic. The Briton warren to which Axl and Beatrice belong appears to be more forgetful the more its

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members socialise and share the air with one another. It is only when Axl is alone that vague fragments of the past come back to haunt him. And Axl and Gawain, both present at Merlin’s enchantment of Querig, could very well be Patient Zero who infected others.82 The mist in the novel is both literal and figurative. Peta Mitchell suggests that atmospheric movements could ‘signify, in cultural expression, a more ambiguous, affective form of contagion that is also bound up with the spread of ideas and information’.83 In his classic study, Routes of Contagion, André Siegfried marked striking parallels between the spread of diseases and the dissemination of ideas. In his conceptual model of idea diffusion, the human mind becomes airborne, like a ‘winged germ, often invisible’.84 Ishiguro similarly deploys the analogy of material airborne infection and immaterial human ideation, but with a twist. If Mitchell and Siegfried conceived of the movement of airborne pathogens as comparable to the spread of ideas and information, the inverse takes place in The Buried Giant. Instead of spreading ideas and information, the dragon’s breath suppresses their taking hold in the mind by inhibiting memory retention and recollection. The toxic air also figures an atmoterrorist attack of the mind. Axl is frustrated by his inability to recall his son’s face, attributes it to ‘the work of this mist’ and calls it ‘cruel when [he] can’t remember a precious thing like that’ (30). And Ivor complains that the debilitating forgetfulness is endangering the safety of his village, as watchmen cannot remember their orders to hold their positions on the fence (59). The mist of oblivion, in Matthew Vernon and Margaret A. Miller’s reading, effects a ‘flattened sense of history’, in which opposing sides of historical conflicts become elided.85 Querig’s miasma creates ‘a historical alter-​space’.86 The toxic cloud is the metaphoric gas chamber of the social mind, a designed air space meant to bring about Arthur’s ‘post-​racial’ utopia. Britain, enveloped completely in the dragon’s breath, becomes a death camp for memories, a mnemonic necropolis. Or, in slightly different terms, Merlin’s magic is what Sloterdijk would term ‘negative air conditioning’.87 But the effect of Querig’s breath is not uniform; there is a toxic unevenness to the severity of intoxication among the populace. While Querig lives, Axl appears to have more access to his memory than Beatrice;

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Wistan has ‘a very special gift to withstand strange spells’ (282); and Gawain remembers everything. Atmoterrorism does not eradicate fully memories of racial violence; it transforms memories into the repressed but indelible contents hidden deep in the unconsciousness. Memory, in the process, converts into the prized object of a heroic quest promised by romance. Racial atmoterrorism becomes ‘the process of modernity as an explication of atmospheres’.88 Before her death, Querig, appearing to Edwin as his mother, calls out to him to save her from Merlin’s magic: ‘Find the strength for me, Edwin. Find the strength and come rescue me’ (186). By the end of the novel, the dragon also uses Edwin as a bait to bring her executioner to her, just as Wistan believes Edwin will lead him directly to Querig (176). Perhaps the dragon’s plea is a death wish, like that of Gawain’s, as both have outlived their usefulness and are barely holding on for someone else to finish them off. Suicide by proxy. But the dragon is not the only creature seeking rescue in the novel. The buried giant, too, calls out to be resurrected and unearthed. That is the true mission of Wistan. If racism is the buried monster, then it seeks rescue so it may ‘breathe’ in the air above ground once more. But if racism is never truly dead but only temporarily buried, and if it can be resuscitated to breathe again and again, how do those who live in its shadow breathe? ‘I can’t breathe’, the dying words of Eric Garner and of George Floyd, have become a rallying cry for antiracist activism since 2014. For Crawley, ‘I can’t breathe’ documents racial violence and refuses its logic and power: ‘ “I can’t breathe” as both the announcement of a particular moment and rupture in the life world of the Garners; and “I can’t breathe” as a rupture, a disruption, an ethical plea regarding the ethical crisis that has been the grounds for producing his moment, our time, this modern world’.89 It is a charge for those still breathing to breathe differently, to reject racial atmoterrorism. The Buried Giant, an investigation into the collapse of a post-​ racial dystopia, asks a slightly different set of questions. Instead of the suffocating chokehold, the novel asks if it is even safe to breathe in an unbreathable space. Not ‘I can’t breathe’, but ‘I shouldn’t breathe’, or, ‘I should hold my breath’. What if the air is too toxic and harmful? What if the form of racial atmoterrorism is fragility? A breathable atmosphere is no longer the given.

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Toxic fragility When does a racialised space become Identitarian, toxic and unbreathable? Where –​along ideological fault lines –​do history and race become untouchable, unengageable, and even disabling? Carolyn Dinshaw, since the mid-​1990s, has returned repeatedly to questions of time. In place of modernity’s linear temporality, asynchrony marks the nature of the human condition past, present and future.90 Temporal heterogeneity allows for a more intimate and queer understanding of the interconnections among objects, persons and events. Asynchrony structures much of her work; her scholarship is an expansive record of her time travels that defy sequential desires and readerly expectations. Going East, Dinshaw reminds us, is going into the past. Increasingly, I find myself thinking about other directional markers and their entanglements with time. As a North American queer medievalist of colour (such are some of the ways I am interpellated into being in the 2020s), I think about the American South where I work and live, a region oversaturated with the rhetoric of heritage and historicised narratives. Political misappropriation of all things medieval, of course, is nothing new. Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl, for example, have examined how the Ku Klux Klan invokes and distorts medieval chivalry to defend race-​based privileges and to justify violence.91 Critical inquiry, Dinshaw suggests, is a performance. The critic is a professional performer in desperate need of a healthy dose of amateurism. But I wonder if such stylised amateurism is affordable for some but not others. Reading Dinshaw’s reading of Mandeville’s Travels, I recognise certain historical and personal ironies. As Dinshaw points out, the pale folks mentioned in the Mandeville’s passage are not modern-​day Indians: From these isles, in passing by the sea ocean towards the east by many journeys, men find a great country and a great kingdom that men clepe Mancy. And that is in Ind the more … And they be full fair folk, but they be all pale … In that land be many fairer women than in any other country beyond the sea, and therefore men clepe that land Albany, because that the folk be white.92

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In fact, Manzi (‘Mancy’) was a derogatory term meaning ‘barbarians’ used by medieval Mongols to refer to both the region and the people in southern China, where I trace my ancestry but have never been. I am the pale Manzi marked by southerness. I am, in certain moments and spaces, a Chinaman in the South, an amateurish medievalist seeking authenticity and authority, a crypto-​ pale, postcolonial subject performing some versions of the medieval past and present. Once in my Arthurian survey course, a student came up to me after class and complained that I had failed to enunciate distinctively the words ‘Arthur’ and ‘author’ during class. In fact, the student claimed they were confused by my English pronunciation and, as a result, found the class that day a waste of their time. Never mind the fact that no one else had complained to me directly or to the department. Whether or not I had actually slurred and fumbled my ‘Arthur’ and ‘author’ was irrelevant. The point was the activation of a laughable stereotype of East Asians’ inability to enunciate and differentiate properly certain English consonants, such as ‘r’ and ‘l’. By pointing out and correcting my English pronunciation, the student was more invested in conjuring the humiliating stock figure of the ‘Chinaman’, which Yunte Huang describes as ‘a yellow coolie who is either an emaciated walking chopstick or fat and greasy like an oafish butcher’.93 And if the Chinaman speaks at all, ‘[w]‌hat comes out of his mouth … is pidgin English, grating singsong of dubious significance’.94 I, with my singsongy pidgin English, had failed to grasp or respect the matters of Arthur. Depending on the context and atmosphere, I am a toxic figure. In the Arthurian survey course, we also read Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart, a popular text loved by many students, I have found. In one of the climactic battle scenes, Lancelot is named explicitly in the text for the first time.95 The effect of hailing on Lancelot is transformative: he turns around in the midst of fighting and sees Guinevere, the object of his desire, looking at him intently from a window in a tower. I usually discussed this scene through Althusser’s concept of interpellation, especially the ‘turn’ of the subject in response to ideology’s hailing that engenders subjectivity.96 My students and I eagerly came up with other examples

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of interpellation: babies responding to their names, the marriage ceremony and court rituals. Then I mentioned how the flag and the national anthem interpellate citizens as citizens qua patriots, as well as an example of protest against state interpellation by Colin Kaepernick, the American football star who in 2016 kneeled and refused to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality towards African Americans. A hush suddenly descended upon the room. No one spoke. An affective shift took place; the space became toxic. In those seconds of silence, my students, who had earlier professed their love for Chrétien’s Lancelot, doubted if the text loved them back. The medieval text was interpellating my class retro-​futuristically. And the silence was interpellating me. The hush witnessed whiteness trying to interpellate itself into being. Daniel Stern argues that synchronous with external, objectifiable movement of affect are internal, subjective events made up of ‘instant-​by-​instant shifts in feeling state, resulting in an array of temporal feeling flow patterns that [he calls] vitality contours’, which include ‘external, objectifiable movements and sounds, such as head turning, pointing, and facial and vocal expressions, that form and decompose’.97 Note that Stern cites head turning –​ which I take to mean the turning of one’s head to acknowledge an address –​as an external behavioural event. What, then, is the vitality contour of interpellation? More important, in terms of my students’ silence: What is the vitality contour of whiteness? The hush, for me, is a moment not necessarily of white fragility, but of white precarity. Fragility may slip into precarity, and vice versa; but they are not the same things. Robin DiAngelo defines white fragility as ‘a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves’.98 Compared to the defensive moves of white fragility, the momentary hush of my class might have appeared to be a ‘refusal to continue engagement’.99 But I think it also marked the failure of a particular mode of interpellation by whiteness, made possible by the intervention of the medieval text, Althusser and Kaepernick. And out of the failure of interpellation, Judith Butler contends, emerges precarity: ‘In some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our

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existence proves precarious when that address fails’.100 Precarity is not fragility. In fact, the vitality contour of precarity (the state of failed interpellation) points towards the capacity for woundedness. Precarity, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes, ‘is the condition of being vulnerable to others’.101 White precarity is the acknowledgement of whiteness’s inherent but unmarked vulnerability. Or, more precisely, the hush of the room marks the condition of white toxicity. Chen argues that the rhetoric of toxicity emerges during times of instability and panic, and that environmental threats are always already economic, political and social threats. Toxins can take the form of ‘abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between’, and toxic bodies are often racialised and sexualised.102 That is, toxicity interpellates objects and beings. A similar cultural logic structures the hush in my classroom. In moving from Lancelot to Althusser and to Kaepernick, particular authorial bodies, textual artefacts and interpretive practices become toxic. This is the vitality contour of whiteness; it makes you turn your head. White toxicity interpellates all bodies in the space of the class; bodies –​textual or physical –​are racialised and sexualised, even queered: Lancelot, Kaepernick, students, me. White fragility is the art of denial, deflection and refusal. DiAngelo’s theory of white fragility first appeared as an academic article in 2011, and later as a book in 2018.103 By 2021, the book, as well as DiAngelo, had attracted much mainstream attention and criticism in the aftermath of the brutal murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd. The critique of DiAngelo often mixes attack on her career choices and on the theory itself. The Left is quick to point out that DiAngelo, despite her education credentials, is a corporate diversity consultant and academic sell-​out who, profiting from her newfound fame, is thereby complicit with neoliberal racial capitalism. Shelagh Brown, for instance, points to DiAngelo’s privileged position as a white woman who, by making money off her book and seminars, fails to acknowledge the ‘generations of uncompensated labour of Black women’.104 In a similar vein, Lauren Michele Jackson finds problematic DiAngelo’s conveniently meeting ‘[the] market demand for white-​ on-​ white pontificating’ and ‘couldn’t help but notice the relative dearth of contemporary black studies scholarship cited in White Fragility’.105 And John McWhorter

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provocatively labels DiAngelo’s work ‘a racist tract’ that ‘[d]‌espite the sincere intentions of its author … diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying [them]’.106 In McWhorter’s view, DiAngelo glorifies white liberal suffering and dehumanises African Americans through condescension and infantilisation. It is difficult if not impossible to parse out critique of DiAngelo’s biologised and class privileges and her career choices from critique of her theory, as the two strands of criticism often overlap. Brown argues that when white people are confronted with their own racism, they resort to emotional reactions that are manipulative, as the affective workings of white fragility recentre white emotions, reaffirm white self-​ victimhood and deny white complicity and responsibility. More problematic, for Brown, is how DiAngelo’s theory has been ‘uplifted as the gold standard’ and thereby frames and dictates how critical conversations about whiteness should take place and unfold.107 For Jackson, what DiAngelo diagnoses as white fragility feels obvious and intuitive to people of colour; in other words, what appears as revelation to white people is old news to the non-​white world. The deeply problematic aspect of the popular embrace of White Fragility, as Jackson observes, is that writing on whiteness qua whiteness ‘can so often veer toward whiteness pro whiteness –​whiteness in the interest of whiteness, whiteness for whiteness’ sake, whiteness to hear itself talk’.108 Significantly, Jackson notes white admission of fragility is frequently conditional on its being some other white people’s problem; such deflection ironically performs one of the defensive moves of white fragility that DiAngelo delineates. Whiteness becomes a solipsistic echo chamber in which ‘[t]‌he gap between knowing and naming, let alone reckoning, remains vast’.109 The fragile item is something delicate in need of tender loving care and protection, but Brown does not think white liberals need any coddling. It is better to relabel white fragility as ‘white hostility’, Brown contends, for it identifies unflinchingly the violence at the heart of racism.110 The moment has come, in the 2020s, to find a new antiracist catchphrase. Acknowledging that much of the critique of white fragility has productively challenged some of its assumptions and implications, as well as its reception by white liberals, I do not want to abandon

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completely the critical force of DiAngelo’s original insights. White fragility is real. While Brown’s recasting of the term as ‘white hostility’ captures accurately the endemic violence of racial encounters, ‘hostility’ does not capture fully the aestheticising workings and affective logic of ‘fragility’. DiAngelo’s White Fragility is part of the culture of advice books on interpersonal etiquette within the capitalist corporate environment. More broadly, it is part of the long tradition of conduct literature in the West that produces and cares for proper individual and collective identities and subjectivities. White Fragility belongs to the consumeristic industry of therapeutic self-​care. Along Foucauldian lines of analysis, admission of white fragility is an act of confession and a technique of liberal governmentality’s disciplinary machinery. Fragility is a performance in which self-​disclosure is simultaneously a self-​defeating and self-​ fulfilling exercise. More precisely, the articulation of white fragility exemplifies J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative, an utterance in which saying it means doing it.111 Trafficking in affects and emotions, white fragility concerns human relationality. In other words, fragility is an emotional capital, if wielded properly. White fragility’s allure lies in its allowance and capacity for the narcissistic self-​admission of guilt and complicity, a performative readily adaptable to the culture of corporate diversity training. The problem with self-​admission, however, is that it is sometimes simply another way of concealing, and thus reinforcing, the very thing it allegedly critiques. As Brown and Jackson have argued, white fragility is simultaneously a partial unmasking and masking of racism. Its power derives from the veiling of its inherent durability and rigidity; beneath white fragility lies an adamantine whiteness that refuses to break. There are, in summation, two manifestations of white fragility: (1) the defensive denial of racism, as formulated by DiAngelo; and (2) the wilful self-​admission of implicit and explicit racism and the deployment of antiracist lingo that in effect recentre whiteness, as critiqued by Jackson and Brown. Both iterations are powerful means of racial control. White fragility is a product of habitus, the social structure that produces, and is in turn sustained by, the practices and dispositions of human actors in their interactions with one another and with their

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environment.112 It is a condition, or more accurately a protective cocoon, of racial comfort that manifests as a self-​fulfilling expectation and as a self-​authorising deflection of any challenges to it. The spatial dynamic of inside-​outside renders white fragility a neoliberal figuration of the antagonism between the enclosure and the surround, which offers a useful way to connect settler colonialism, white fragility and racial atmoterrorism. Or, as Harney and Moten would phrase it, in becoming an iteration of racial atmoterrorism, white fragility reverses the power differential between the fort and the surround. White fragility is the defence of white air space, a castle in the clouds. As Julia Schade observes, ‘[c]‌ontrolling air as a “common” and “protecting” it from “Black pneuma” proves to be whiteness’s historical obsession’.113 Black pneuma, according to Crawley, is the enunciation of ‘life that is exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally, social, though it is also life that is structured through and engulfed by brutal violence’.114 White air is the violence of enclosure, and Black pneuma is the life of the surround. Yet the fort-​surround antagonism does not hold in air, for as Choy observes, ‘[a]ir muddies the distinction between subjects and environments, and between subjects’.115 Held in common, air resists partition, privatisation and ownership. In the choreography of inhalation and exhalation, Schade reminds us, ‘breathing implies an opening towards that which constitutes the “outside” and the “other” of the self-​contained body’; in fact, there is ‘no breathing without taking in foreign matter with every breath and carrying a trace of the others’ breath in us, taking in air and giving it back’.116 Air dissolves the opposition of fort and the surround, the false inversion of aggression and self-​defence.

Antiracist breathing exercises In a chilling way, The Buried Giant is a Bildungsroman of a future racist-​terrorist. It is a cautionary tale about radicalisation in the modern world; an alternate title for the novel might be The Education of a Terrorist as a Young Man. Wistan, who takes Edwin under his wings at the end of the narrative, predicts that ‘[a]‌fierce future now opens before him’ (298). Throughout the journey to Querig’s lair, Wistan reminds Edwin of Arthur’s war crimes against

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the Saxons: ‘It was Britons under Arthur slaughtered our kind. It was Britons took your mother and mine. We’ve a duty to hate every man, woman and child of their blood. So promise me this … promise me you’ll tend well this hatred in your heart’ (242). Radicalisation itself is already an act of terror, even before the radicalised engages in terrorism. As Sloterdijk notes, ‘[t]here is no terrorist acte gratuit, no original “let there be” of terror’ because ‘the individual terrorist act is never an absolute beginning’.117 Wistan’s calculated recruitment and training of Edwin follow the stages of radicalisation from (1) sensitivity [the abduction of your mother, just like that of mine], to (2) group membership [the slaughter of our kind] and to (3) action [a fierce future lies ahead].118 As it turns out, Edwin, and not the dragon or the giant, is the real object of Wistan’s quest. Radicalisation takes place not through atmoterrorism (the dragon’s breath), but through an emotive appeal to blood and soil. As a political allegory and a social text, The Buried Giant belongs to the literature of white liberalism, characterised by Melissa Phruksachart as ‘a long tradition of white people thinking they can read their way out of trouble’.119 It is a genre that promises a white, white-​identified or white-​adjacent reader that at the end of the reading endeavour will emerge ‘a self-​reflective, emotionally regulated white (or white-​adjacent) antiracist person’ who can be fully integrated into Western modernity.120 The literature of white liberalism is essentially a DIY advice book that teaches racial literacy and proper etiquette during ‘race talk’. While Phruksachart restricts the genre to nonfiction, I would like to broaden the tent to include works of fiction, such as The Buried Giant, that exhibit similar tendencies and circulate within a predominantly white liberal readership eager to profess its ‘wokeness’. Reading the literature of white liberalism accrues antiracist capital, which translates into social capital. The genre caters to not the top one per cent but the top twenty per cent, ‘a multiracial, though white-​majority, class formation … the upper-​middle class dream hoarders’.121 Reading thus becomes a class-​defining activity, and no good white liberals want to be backward racists who do not read. Jodi Melamed has further argued that ‘[t]‌he idea that literature has something to do with antiracism and being a good person has entered into the self-​care of elites, who have learned to see themselves as part of a multi-​national group of enlightened multicultural

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global citizens’.122 Neoliberal universities now operate as racialising institutions that, in the name of self-​care, inculcate their students with a respectable etiquette of multiculturalism so they can become good modern subjects.123 Literary studies, Melamed highlights, ‘interpellates elites as multicultural global citizens and provides them with information bits about global difference’.124 I think back to the student who deems ‘Twain: OK’ but ‘Ishiguro: What’s the point?’ The student likely does not think of themself as a racist, yet self-​denial marks the student as what I in Chapter 1 term a ‘white fragiliac’. Chances are that the student is already familiar with official antiracist lingo acquired elsewhere, possibly in courses explicitly flagged as fulfilling the curriculum’s diversity requirement. Consequently, The Buried Giant does not offer additional usable information bits. Mark Twain as Mark Twain, the author of the Great American Novel, is of course ‘OK’ by default. But not so with Ishiguro, and by extension, with me. Been there; done that. I am always intrigued by some students’ profession of love for Arthurian literature. To be more accurate, it is almost always a love for kitschy pop cultural phenomena like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Disney’s The Sword in the Stone or the BBC’s series Merlin. Such confessions are sometimes an unctuous ploy to get into the class when enrolment is competitive. The students’ pre-​emptive confessions of love of Arthur are also tacit promises that they will ace the course, presumably because they already ‘know’ the materials (and therefore have nothing new to learn or study for exams). This sense of pre-​acquired expertise may easily slip into privileged, racialised knowledge when it comes in contact with non-​European re-​imaginings of the Arthurian tradition and/​ or when it is situated within a class led by a BIPOC instructor. Michael Hardt, in his critique of the common misunderstanding of love, contends that one misconception is that love ‘names either the bond experienced by those who are already the same or the process of unification by which differences are shed or set aside’.125 It is a narcissistic love. The students who pre-​emptively declare their already-​acquired knowledge of Arthurian materials are engaging in the logic of sameness of false love: they belong to the class because the course subject and they are one and the same. Their love for Arthur already interpellates them as authority figures who do not need me.

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The trouble with liberal antiracism is that it can easily ‘be subsumed into workplace trainings’ and turned into a mechanism for white liberal interpellation.126 But the classroom is not a diversity workshop. It is a social environment of cohabitation and co-​ breathing, insofar that its air circulates and dissolves the opposition between the enclosure and the surround, between the space of critical inquiry and the cultural-​political climate at large. The classroom is both a site of education and an extension of the pneumatic common. As Derek R. Ford analyses, the classroom is a transitory space of pedagogical encounter that ‘provides immunological protection from the outside at the same time as it lives toward its bursting and absorption into that outside’.127 The ‘air bubble’ of the class –​both the material element and the affective atmosphere –​is simultaneously enveloping and immersive; it straddles the enclosure–​surround divide. Or, in Sloterdijk’s terms, the classroom is one instantiation of the ‘breathed commune’ in which subjects come into being through collective inhalation and exhalation.128 Thinking about air’s materiality, Choy suggests, ‘orients us to the many means, practices, experiences, weather events, and economic relations that co-​implicates us at different points as “breathers” … [a term that] refers to those who accrue the unaccounted-​for-​ costs that attend the production and consumption of goods and services’.129 Likewise, in the classroom, thinking as breathing is implicative. The air is never neutral but is saturated by ‘a history, a politics, an economy; in short, the air has conditions’.130 Attending to the air’s conditions and conditionings, Ford suggests, would elucidate the imbrications of history, politics and representation: specifically, how the pneumatic common ‘is cut across by hierarchy, identity, and difference’.131 The history of modern education is intimately linked to the history of modern air conditioning technologies. As air conditioning spread from factories into public spaces such as movie theatres and department stores in the 1920s, shielding paying customers from the masses, it also entered into elite universities. Michelle Murphy’s study of the popularisation of ‘the comfort zone’ in the twentieth century highlights the research at Yale and Harvard by members of the American Society for Heating and Ventilation Engineers.132 Controlled air chambers into which white men were placed measured correlations among artificial climate,

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the labouring body and productivity. Comfortable air space, unsurprisingly, was conducive to comfortable and productive labour. The environmental science of maximising intellectual labour then elevated the measurements of white, male labouring bodies to universal status: ‘Particular bodies elevated to universals and the mechanically built environment articulated each other, called each other into a particular form’.133 Identity and the air are mutually productive; air conditioning is identity conditioning. In the context of higher education, the air conditioning of pedagogical spaces is not simply literal but also ideological and representational. The racialising neoliberal university that Melamed critiques, which teaches respectable antiracist lingo and social capital as repeatable information bits, is the latest incarnation of the concept of a stress-​free educational zone. Comfortable learning is both the structure and the goal, a racialised environmentality. White fragility, I argue, is precisely a defensive mechanism to protect the neoliberal comfort zone. As such, white fragility is a form of racialised environmentality. But what happens when a breathed commune becomes an unbreathable world? When history and politics condition the air of the built environment negatively? Writing about the daily struggles of asthma patients navigating spaces hostile to breathing, Alison Keener observes that ‘[a]‌ny place may be unbreathable, making it difficult to be certain of health, how the body will respond to its environment’.134 What may be a normal milieu for some could be deadly to asthma sufferers. Sharing atmosphere does not mean sharing equally sustainable air spaces. And vulnerabilities to unbreathable spaces become pronounced and accumulative if one were a woman, coloured, poor, under the age of eighteen or of any intersectional identity.135 I would like to suggest that the classroom too functions as a breathed commune and as an unbreathable space; frequently, it is both at the same time, depending on the breathers. As I teach a text like The Buried Giant, the novel becomes an air conditioner. I do not claim that the world of the novel –​its cultural and ideological atmosphere –​is the same as that of my classroom. It is not. But the collective reading-​teaching of the novel, the communal inhalation and exhalation of a teaching text, has rendered visible the racialised ‘air bubbles’ within the neoliberal university. Put differently, the novel ‘breathes’ like Querig, enshrouding the

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classroom in its miasma and producing differentiated space. An environment may be shared, but it may be experienced or embodied unevenly and disjointly. White fragility triggered by the Arthurian medievalism of the novel is an aerial toxicant that claims to intervene in racial inequity yet reproduces and disseminates it, thereby causing further harms. It is a form of racial atmoterrorism. Edwin, bitten by a baby dragon, becomes Patient Zero with the venom coursing through his veins. The ‘zero’ designates him as source and carrier, a superspreader and a stranger, effectively turning him into a seemingly contagious vector feared by Saxon villagers. Adapting the terminology of zero to the classroom, I propose an analogous role of ‘Breather Zero’, one who is not some mysterious producer of knowledge or disciplinarian, but an active resource and an intellectual grounding of the classroom ecology. That is, the teacher-​scholar is an air designer of the class, not a corporate diversity consultant or a peddler of the literature of white liberalism. The air is substantiated through breathers.136 Breather Zero recognises the shared atmosphere of the class and beyond, teaches through implication and not interpellation, and practises a political concept of love that creates social bonds in ‘a field of multiplicity’.137 Like breathing, teaching is recursive. The mist of racialised and racialising difference will likely reappear. But I will read The Buried Giant with my class again and again, to challenge toxicity, precarity and fragility; to confront the Identitarian machine of terror; to resist neoliberal racist environmentality; and to foster a breathable space.

Notes 1 Timothy K. Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 146. 2 Marjin Nieuwenhuis, ‘Breathing Materiality: Aerial Violence at a Time of Atmospheric Politics’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9:3 (2016), 499. 3 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), p. 17. 4 I would like to thank Zun Lee for his insights.

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5 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 5. 6 I borrow the term ‘terrorist assemblage’ from Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 7 Markus Willinger, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers (London: Arktos Media, 2013), n.p. 8 See José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). 9 Guillaume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes, trans. E. Christian Kopff (London: Arktos Media, 2012), p. 10. 10 Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, trans. Michael O’Meara (London: Arktos Media, 2011), p. 171. 11 Ibid., p. 133. 12 Ibid., p. 266. 13 American Identity Movement, ‘Five Principles’, 2019, https://​ americani​dent​itym​ovem​ent.com/​five-​principles/​(accessed on 1 June 2020). 14 Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 15 Identity Evropa, 2017–​ 18, https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​201​8090 7011​709. https://​www.ide​ntit​yevr​opa.com/​ (accessed on 1 June 2020). 16 Faye, Why We Fight, pp. 129 and 106. 17 Ibid., p. 133. 18 Ibid., p. 122. 19 Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier (New York: Scribner’s, 1911), p. 686. 20 See Daniel Helbert, ‘Future Nostalgias: Environmental Medievalism and Lanier’s Southern Chivalry’, Studies in Medievalism, 26 (2017), 11–​ 19; and Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 21 See Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995). 22 Richard Spencer, ‘Foreword’, in Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent, or, The Expansion of Races in America (Abergele: The Palingenesis Project, 2013), p. xxi. 23 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Robert E. Lee and the Nation’, Sewanee Review, 15:2 (1907), 175. 24 Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York: Century, 1902).

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25 For medieval hunting as a symbol of elite masculinity, see Eric J. Goldberg, ‘Louis the Pious and the Hunt’, Speculum, 88:3 (2013), 613–​43. 26 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Foreword’, in The Master of Game (New York: Duffield, 1909), pp. xxiv and xxviii. 27 Ibid., p. xxi. 28 On the history of nativist greenwashing, see Heidi Beirich, Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism and the Hypocrisy of Hate (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010). 29 Evolalinkola, ‘The Alt-​Right Is Green: Not a Pepe Meme’, altright. com (26 July 2017). https://​www.altri​ght.com/​2017/​ 07/​26/​the-​alt-​ right-​is-​green-​not-​a-​pepe-​meme/​ (accessed on 1 June 2020). 30 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 123. 31 Guy Standing, ‘The Precariat –​The New Dangerous Class’, Policy Network, May 2011, 1. 32 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 185. 33 Ibid., p. 181. 34 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 245. 35 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), p. 59. 36 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origin of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 12. 37 See R. J. W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal (eds), The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States: History, Nationhood, and the Search for Origins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Daniel Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2018); and Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-​First Century (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). 38 Timothy Reuter, ‘Whose Race, Whose Ethnicity? Recent Medievalists’ Discussions of Identity’, in Janet L. Nelson (ed.), Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 104. 39 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 50. 40 Ibid., p. 51. See Claude Lévi-​ Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). 41 For thinking race alongside ethnicity in early medieval studies, see Nicole Lopez-​Jantzen, ‘Between Empires: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16:9–​10 (2019), 1–​12. 42 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 133.

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43 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–​1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010), pp. 259–​60, my emphasis. 44 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 260. 45 Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 69. 46 Faye, Why We Fight, pp. 245–​6. 47 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 413). 48 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 267. 49 Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 246. 50 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 268. 51 Ibid., p. 77. 52 Ibid., p. 50; and Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-​catastrophic Age, trans. Sergio Knipe (London: Arktos Media, 2010), p. 88. 53 Faye, Why We Fight, p. 79. 54 Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes, p. 201. 55 For studies of bias in student evaluations, see Kerry Chávez and Kristina M. W. Mitchell, ‘Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity’, PS: Political Science & Politics, 53:2 (2020), 270–​4; Michelle Falkoff, ‘Why We Must Stop Relying on Student Ratings of Teaching’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 April 2018; and Landon D. Reid, ‘The Role of Perceived Race and Gender in the Evaluation of College Teaching on RateMyProfessors.com’, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 3:3 (2010), 137–​52. 56 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (New York: Vintage International, 2016). All subsequent quotations are from this edition by page numbers. 57 See David Matthews, ‘Exhuming the Giant’, The New Chaucer Society blog (29 April 2015). https://​newcha​ucer​soci​ety.org/​blog/​entry/​ exhum​ing-​the-​giant (accessed on 1 June 2020); Matthew Vernon and Margaret A. Miller, ‘Navigating Wonder: The Medieval Geographies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’, Arthuriana, 28:4 (2018), 68–​ 9; Sian Cain, ‘Writer’s Indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro Rejects Claims of Genre Snobbery’, The Guardian (8 March 2015). https://​www. theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2015/​mar/​08/​kazuo-​ishig​uro-​rebu​ffs-​genre-​ snobb​ery (accessed on 1 June 2020); and Michiko Kakutani, ‘In “The Buried Giant”, Ishiguro Revisits Memory and Denial’, The New York

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Times (23 February 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/ books/review-in-the-buried-giant-ishiguro-revisits-memory-anddenial.html (accessed on 1 June 2020). 58 See Alexandra Alter, ‘For Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Buried Giant” Is a Departure’, New York Times (19 February 2015). https://​nyti.ms/​ 1zRfPqV (accessed on 1 June 2020); see also Ursula Le Guin, ‘Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?’, blogpost (2 March 2015). https://​ www.ursula​kleg​uin.com/​blog/​2015-​archive?rq=​ishiguro (accessed on 1 June 2020). 59 Alter, ‘For Kazuo Ishiguro’. 60 Gaby Wood, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro: “Most Countries Have Got Big Things They’ve Buried” ’, The Telegraph, 27 February 2015. 61 Massumi, ‘Future Birth’, p. 61. 62 Ibid., p. 62, original emphasis. 63 Ibid., p. 62, original emphasis. 64 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Introduction: Airquake’, in Foams: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016), p. 99. An earlier translation appeared as a separate book. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009). The scholarship on air, the atmosphere and breathing is robust and growing. Important works include Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); the special issue, ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body and World’, ed. Rebecca Oxley and Andrew Russell of Body & Society, 26:2 (2020); Mark Jackson and Maria Fannin, ‘Letting Geography Fall Where It May –​Aerographies Address the Elemental’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29:3 (2011), 435–​44, and other essays in the same issue; and Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 65 See Joerg Fichte, ‘Sir Gawain or the Remains of King Arthur: Ars oblivionis versus ars memoriae in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’, in Cora Dietl and Christoph Schanze (eds), Formen arthurischen Erzählens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 361–​83. Fichte notes that the dragon’s breath leads to a loss of civilisation and a regression to the state of primitivism (p. 372). 66 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 10. 67 Ibid., p. 10. 68 Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘My Twentieth Century Evening –​and Other Small Breakthroughs’, Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2017,

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NobelPrize.org. https://​www.nob​elpr​ize.org/​pri​zes/​lit​erat​ure/​2017/​ ishiguro/​25124-​kazuo-​ishiguro-​nobel-​lecture-​2017/​ (accessed on 1 June 2020). See also Elizabeth Burow-​Flak, ‘Genocide, Memory, and the Difficulties of Forgiveness in Card’s Ender Saga and Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’, REN, 71:4 (2019), 247–​67. Burow-​Flak reads the buried giant as a metaphor for the aftermath of genocide. 69 Carmen-​ Veronica Borbely, ‘The Monster as Placeholder of the Memory/​ Oblivion Divide in Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’, in Petronia Petrar and Amelia Precup (eds), Constructions of Identity (VIII): Discourses in the English-​Speaking World (Cluj-​Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2016), p. 23. 70 See Deimantas Valančiūnas, ‘Forgetting or Making to Forget: Memory, Trauma and Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant’, in Regina Rudaitytė (ed.), History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 213–​ 28. Valančiūnas argues that ‘national (collective) memory is being controlled by the state apparatus of power, since it is King Arthur who controls the memory as well as the production of the national past’ (p. 222). 71 Michael Eigen, Toxic Nourishment (London: Routledge, 2018). 72 Choy, Ecologies of Comparison, p. 145. 73 Ibid., p. 157. 74 Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). See also Achille Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’, trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, In the Moment (13 April 2020). https://​ crit​inq.wordpr​ess.com/​ 2020/​04/​13/​the-​universal-​right-​to-​breathe/​ (accessed on 1 June 2020). 75 Sloterdijk, ‘Airquake’, p. 85. 76 Ibid., p. 91. 77 Ibid., p. 94. 78 Ibid., p. 94. 79 Borbely, ‘Monster as Placeholder’, p. 31. 80 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 2. 81 Wald, Contagious, p. 2. The outbreak narrative is characterised by late-​twentieth-​century medicine and visual culture; it differs from the earlier and older tradition of the plague narrative, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron. 82 See Nancy Ciccone, ‘Now and Then: Ishiguro’s Medievalism in The Buried Giant’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, ed. Richard Utz, 32

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(2017), 1–​7. For Ciccone, Arthur’s legacy and image are split between Gawain and Axl (3). 83 Peta Mitchell, ‘Geographies/​Aerographies of Contagion’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29:3 (2011), 533. 84 André Siegfried, Routes of Contagion, trans. Jean Henderson and Mercedes Clarasó (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 93. 85 Vernon and Miller, ‘Navigating Wonder’, 82. 86 Ibid., 83. 87 Sloterdijk, ‘Airquake’, p. 199. 88 Ibid., p. 119. 89 Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath, p. 1. 90 See Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 91 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 140–​3. 92 Dinshaw cites from the Cotton Manuscript version of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Available at Project Gutenberg. 93 Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 153. 94 Ibid., p. 153. 95 Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart, trans. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1997). 96 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–​86. 97 Daniel Stern, ‘Vitality Contours: The Temporal Contour of Feelings as a Basic Unit for Constructing the Infant’s Social Experience’, in Philippe Rochat (ed.), Early Social Cognition: Understanding Others in the First Months of Life (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), p. 67. 98 Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3:3 (2011), 54. 99 Ibid., 61. 100 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 310. 101 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 20.

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102 Mel Y. Chen, ‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections’, GLQ, 17:2–​3 (2011), 265. 103 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018). 104 Shelagh Brown, ‘White Fragility? Naw, It’s White Hostility’, Medium (23 January 2020). https://​med​ium.com/​@shela​ghbr​own/​ white-​fragil​ity-​naw-​its-​white-​hostil​ity-​8dbe8​b08b​5c8 (accessed on 1 June 2020). 105 Lauren Michele Jackson, ‘What’s Missing From “White Fragility” ’, Slate (4 September 2019). https://​slate.com/​human-​inter​est/​2019/​ 09/​white-​fragil​ity-​robin-​diang​elo-​works​hop.html (accessed on 1 June 2020). 106 John McWhorter, ‘The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility’, The Atlantic (15 July 2020). https://​www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​ ideas/​arch​ive/​2020/​07/​dehum​aniz​ing-​condes​cens​ion-​white-​fragil​ity/​ 614​146/​ (accessed on 1 June 2021). 107 Brown, ‘White Fragility?’ 108 Jackson, ‘What’s Missing’, original emphasis. 109 Ibid. 110 Brown, ‘White Fragility?’ 111 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 112 DiAngelo works from Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 72–​95. 113 Julia Schade, ‘The Breathing Machine’, Society for Sick Societies, Social Text Online (18 December 2020). https://​social​text​jour​nal.org/​ perisc​ope_​arti​cle/​soci​ety-​for-​sick-​societ​ies-​the-​breath​ing-​mach​ine/​ (accessed on 1 June 2021). 114 Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath, p. 38. 115 Choy, Ecologies of Comparison, p. 157. 116 Schade, ‘Breathing Machine’. 117 Sloterdijk, ‘Airquake’, p. 100. 118 See Bertjan Doosje, Fathali M Moghaddam, et al., ‘Terrorism, Radicalization and De-​ radicalization’, Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 (2016), 79–​84. 119 Melissa Phruksachart, ‘The Literature of White Liberalism’, The Boston Review (21 August 2020). http://​bosto​nrev​iew.net/​race/​ meli​ssa-​phruk​sach​art-​lit​erat​ure-​white-​lib​eral​ism (accessed on 1 June 2021). 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid.

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122 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 45. 123 See also Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 124 Melamed, Represent and Destroy, p. 45. 125 Michael Hardt, ‘For Love or Money’, Cultural Anthropology, 26:4 (2011), 677. 126 Phruksachart, ‘Literature of White Liberalism’. 127 Derek R. Ford, ‘The Air Conditions of Philosophy of Education: Toward a Microsphereology of the Classroom’, in Eduardo Duarte (ed.), Philosophy of Education 2015 (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2016), p. 263. 128 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Introduction: The Allies; Or, the Breathed Commune’, in Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), pp. 17–​82. 129 Choy, Ecologies of Comparison, pp. 145–​6, my emphasis. 130 Derek R. Ford, ‘Pneumatic: Education, Air, and the Common’, in Derek R. Ford (ed.), Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Leiden: Brill, 2019), p. 291, original emphasis. 131 Ford, ‘Pneumatic’, p. 285. 132 Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 19–​34. 133 Ibid., p. 26. 134 Alison Kenner, ‘Emplaced Care and Atmospheric Politics in Unbreathable Worlds’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39:6 (2021), 1124. 135 Ibid., 1125. 136 Choy, Ecologies of Comparison, pp. 139–​ 68; Kenner, ‘Emplaced Care’, 1119. 137 Hardt, ‘For Love or Money’, 678.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. absence 69–​74 aesthetics 119, 180, 195, 207, 211, 214, 215 affect and 181, 183, 200, 205 empathy and 308–​9 precarity and 165, 179 superflat 189–​92, 197 affect 86, 183–​4, 199–​200, 232, 359, 368 aesthetics and 200, 205 of audience 52, 180 colour and 18–​19 economy of 113, 371 and objects 116, 117 see also grief; mourning; shame; shock affective labour 16, 19, 89, 94, 95, 112–​14 Agamben, Giorgio 137, 145 Aguilar, Laura, Grounded #111 238–​41, 243, 249, 252, 261 Ahmed, Sara 36, 243, 244, 282, 330 on affect 113, 117, 199, 204 air 360, 361, 362–​3, 364–​5, 372, 375–​7

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin 273 Akerman, James R. 61 Alberti, Leon Battista 108, 111 Albertus Magnus 58, 59, 236 allegory/​allegoresis 160, 161, 162, 163 Allen, Theodore W. 3 Allen, Valerie 114 Allsen, Thomas 13 Althusser, Louis 62, 253, 256, 257, 259, 273, 330 anaracialism 329 animacy 30, 237–​8, 242–​3, 319 animals 13, 30, 316–​25 Anselm of Canterbury 17, 21, 22 anthropomorphism 182, 187 anti-​Blackness 230, 278–​9, 281 antiracism 365, 373–​4, 375 anti-​Semitism 134, 180, 210–​13, 347 Anzieu, Didier 133, 158–​60 Appadurai, Arjun 59 archeofuturism 354 Aristotle 6, 16, 54, 58, 59, 137, 231

426

Index

Arthur, King 354–​6, 358, 360, 361, 374 assemblages 72, 183, 268, 269, 310, 321 animacy and 30, 34 terrorist 342, 352, 354 asterisks 9–​11, 313 in whit*lether 133, 134, 165, 168–​9 in white*ness 9–​11, 314, 341 atmosphere see air atmoterrorism 362–​3, 372, 377 Auchinleck Manuscript 258, 259, 292 auctors 188, 189, 214 audience 52, 159, 180, 211, 312 and cuteness 182, 183, 187 Augustine 104, 150, 151 Austin, J. L. 76, 314, 371 authorship 64–​9, 151, 180, 182, 210–​11, 327–​8 Azuma, Hiroki 190 Bacon, Roger 98 Bale, Anthony 212 baptism 229, 257, 278 Barney, Stephen 142 Barthes, Roland 65, 66, 125, 184, 214, 272, 288 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 6, 7, 12, 168 Bartlett, Robert 4 Beadle, Richard 142 beauty 56–​8, 104 Beckwith, Sarah 137, 146, 162 Bede 135 behabitives 76 Benson, C. David 201 Bernard Silvester 161 Bersuire, Pierre 150 Best, Stephen 231 Bevington, David M. 142, 172

biopolitics 24, 29, 30–​2, 137–​8, 139, 145, 237 Al-​Biruni 115 facial recognition technology 231–​3, 342 geontopower and 237, 341–​2 blackface 132, 143, 144, 145 blackness 6–​7, 23, 132, 143, 144, 266, 341 Blanchot, Maurice 60, 67, 75 blindness 24, 132, 134–​7, 140–​1, 144–​5, 249, 279–​80 face 229, 231–​3 blood 109, 111, 151, 163 Bloomfield, Morton 325 Blurton, Heather 211 bodies 8, 86, 91, 145, 260–​72 in abeyance (de souffrance) 159–​60, 162 authorial 183, 188 backs 240, 251–​2 cartography and 54–​8 Christian social 137–​8 conceptualisation of 270–​1 dead 75 disabled 138, 145 of foetuses 234, 236 Jewish 138–​9, 168 performing 144, 162 precarious 133, 139 suffering (en souffrance) 159, 162 technology and 247–​8 women’s 54, 56–​8, 109 see also blood; eyes; faces; flesh; lap; skin body politic 137, 167 Boethius 97 Boffey, Julia 214 Bondi, Liz 50 Borbely, Carmen-​Veronica 361, 363

724

Index borders/​boundaries 102, 118, 132, 146, 163–​4, 188, 321 Bornstein, Marc H. 23 Bowers, John 117 Brantley, Jessica 194, 210, 212 breath 360, 361, 362, 363, 364–​5, 372, 375–​7 British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. XII 52 British Library, MS Addit. ​37049, 153, 154 British Library, MS Harley 1527 234, 236 British Library, MS Harley 4972 100 British Library, MS Royal 19 D.I. 13, 14 British Library, MS Sloane 249 234, 236 Bromyard, John 140 Brown, Bill 91, 113 Brown, Carleton 146 Brown, Shelagh 369, 370, 371 Buhrer, Eliza 285 Bull, Hedley 350, 352, 353 Buolamwini, Joy 232 Burger, Glenn 84 Burrow, John 185–​6, 192 Butler, Judith 24, 62, 165, 166, 252, 253, 257, 368 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 384/​604 243 Camille, Michael 136 capital 204, 213, 305 affective 371 cultural 282, 320 faith as 213 racial 306, 320, 321, 324 social 373, 376 capitalism 87, 203–​4, 283–​6, 306, 347

427

cuteness and 179, 203 the hold and 305, 306 precarity and 25–​6, 165, 166 racial 119, 284, 285, 329, 341 white 320–​1 Carpenter, Sarah 147, 148 Carruthers, Mary 205 Carson, Anne 69 cartography see mapping Caviness, Madeline 7, 320 Caxton, William 327 Chaganti, Seeta 117, 118 Chandler, John H. 268 Charbonneau, Joanne 193 Charlottesville 2017 342, 343, 347 Charter of Christ, The (poem) 153–​4, 155 ‘Charter of human redemption’ (verse) 153, 154 Chaucer, Geoffrey authorial persona 180, 182–​3, 184, 187, 210–​11, 327–​8 Book of the Duchess, The 7, 18, 49–​77 defaute, use of 51, 60 male parturition in 65–​6 mapping in 54–​8, 61, 72 memory in 52–​4, 59 subjectivity in 63–​9 toponymy in 51–​4, 59 unlost in 69–​74 white fragiliacs in 76–​7 General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales 188, 189 Knight’s Tale, The 198, 310 Legend of Good Women 68 Man of Law’s Tale, The 68 Parliament of Fowls, The 319 Prioress’s Tale, The 180, 209–​13

428

Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey (continued) Sir Thopas 7, 179–​215 cutification in 184–​9, 205 disgust in 207–​9 manuscripts of 194 movement in 197–​9 Prologue 180, 182–​3, 187–​9 reception 214 superflatness of 192–​9, 205 sweetness in 199–​201 verse form 185–​6, 194–​7, 210 Squire’s Tale, The 8, 306–​37, 315–​28 Chaucer, stand-​in for 327–​8 editions 320–​1 empathy in 309–​12 error in 316–​25 as passing narrative 315–​16 reception 306, 325–​8 Chen, Mel Y. 30, 38, 237, 238, 239, 240, 360–​1 Cheng, Anne Anlin 283 Cherniss, Michael D. 64, 97 childlikeness 182, 183, 185, 205–​7 chivalry 13, 348–​50, 366 Choy, Timothy K. 362, 372, 375 Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot 310, 367–​8 Christ body of 137–​8, 145–​7 skin 150–​7, 158 Jewishness of 168, 169 as Lamb of God 109, 111 maps, featured on 54 as parchment book 151–​4, 155 Passion 131, 132–​3, 140–​1, 150–​2, 155–​6 crucifixion 145, 162 whit[*]lether costume 23, 133–​4, 162–​4, 165

Christ Charter 133, 153, 154, 169 Christianity 2, 97, 104, 133, 227–​8, 250, 256–​7 see also baptism; conversion; revelation; salvation Cicero 207 Clarke, Charles Cowden 321 class 6, 22, 144, 149, 166, 203, 215 elite 76, 319–​20, 373–​4 classification 306, 314, 316, 318 clothing 2, 150 see also costume Clough, Patricia Ticineto 87, 113, 118 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 4, 5, 31, 242, 261 colonialism 210, 291, 340–​2 colour 4, 6–​7, 131, 191 intensification 88–​9 memory and 17–​19, 22, 88 object relations of 21–​2 perception 18, 88, 149–​50 and race 6–​7, 31 refined concepts of 23 stretching of 12, 168–​9 theories of 6, 12 commodification 91, 94, 116, 117 commodity fetishes 116, 164, 203, 230, 285 commonality 375–​7 compactness 182, 185–​6 concealment 116, 117, 118, 119, 160–​2, 240, 371 Connor, Steven 21, 75, 162 consolation 97–​8, 99, 114 consumption 200–​4, 208–​9 contre-​practice 326–​7 conversion 132, 229, 230, 245–​7, 270–​2, 277–​8 biopolitics and 139 blindness, cure for 135–​6 compulsory 291

924

Index as death 277 paradoxes of 271–​2, 281 Cooper, Helen 64 Copeland, Rita 160 Copjec, Joan 95 Corpus Christi feast 141, 143, 149, 166 Corsa, Helen Storm 198 cosmopolitanism 347 costume 132, 147 whit lether body-​suit 23, 147–​8, 158, 162–​4 courtliness 50, 56–​8, 69, 76, 320, 326 courtly love 76, 95–​6, 103, 119, 198, 344 Crane, Susan 2, 307 Crawley, Ashon T. 362, 365, 372 Creation of the World (play) 147 critical race studies/​theory 3, 330 see also premodern critical race studies critical whiteness studies 3–​4 cross-​racial recognition deficit (CRRD) 316 culturalisation 179–​80, 212 culturalism 204 Cummings, Brian 313 Curtius, Ernst Robert 151 cuteness 179–​215 ‘Aww’ response to 181–​2, 183–​4 caretaking response to 183–​4 disgust and 207–​9 markers of 182–​3, 184–​7 poetic 195–​6 queerness and 188–​9, 207 stickiness of 199–​200 sweetness and 199–​201 violence and 193, 186–​7, 209 cutification 180, 203, 205, 209–​10, 211–​12

429

Cvjetanovic, Peter 342 Czarnowus, Anna 264 da Silva, Denise Ferreira 27, 34 Dale, Joshua Paul 181, 189 Damigo, Nathan 342 Daniel, Henry 29, 262, 263, 272 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso 49, 105–​6 Darton, F. J. Harvey 321 Davidson, Arnold 326 Davidson, Clifford 157 Davidson, Joyce 50 Davis, Kathleen 313, 326 de Grazia, Margreta 312, 313, 328 de Man, Paul 38 death 71, 74–​5, 77, 278, 319 conversion and 277, 291 defacement 254, 275, 276–​7, 281 defaute (lack/​loss) 49, 51, 60 defecation 208–​9 deformation 179–​80, 186–​8, 192, 234 Deleuze, Gilles 245, 249, 251 demons/​devils 141–​5, 234, 236 deracialisation 314, 326, 361 Derrida, Jacques 17, 71, 73, 91, 118, 164 ergon and parergon 100–​3, 118 desire 16, 17, 19, 94–​103, 108, 110 DiAngelo, Robin 15, 25, 75, 119, 368, 369–​71 différance 17 difference 204, 205, 311–​12, 356 Dinshaw, Carolyn 366 disabilities 138, 145 discourse, propriety of 70–​1 disease 363–​4 disgust 207–​9, 214 displacement 69–​74, 75, 212, 228

430 distance 94–​103, 110, 310 domesticity 205–​7 Donkin, R. A. 115 dorsality 230, 247–​9, 251–​3, 256 dreams/​dreaming 52, 267–​9, 310 Dyer, Richard 4, 77 Earl, James W. 92 early modern period 312, 313–​14 see also Renaissance Eco, Umberto 104 ecofascism 348, 350 Edmondson, George 88, 90, 96, 97, 104 Edney, Matthew H. 56, 60 Edson, Evelyn 52 Edward of Norwich 348 ego 133, 158–​60, 162 ekphrasis 324 Ellmann, Maud 70–​1 elsewheres 62, 66, 74, 95, 119 embodiment 87, 157, 229, 314 emotion see affect empathy 306, 307–​10, 311, 314, 318–​19 Eng, David L. 74 Englishness 50, 74 Enrique, Micheline 159 enrootment 345, 347, 352 environmentalism 341–​2, 345–​7, 348, 349–​50 environmentality 342, 347, 352–​3, 359, 360–​1, 376 ergon (Derrida) 100–​3, 118 Esposito, Roberto 24, 237, 260 ethnicity 4–​5, 351 eyes 135–​7, 191 facelessness 240, 241, 244, 262 faces 231–​3, 243–​5

Index double 256 face-​objects 288 of mothers 287–​93 (non)human, marker of 234–​6 reading of 231, 233, 290–​1 facial recognition technology 231–​3, 342 facialisation/​face-​work 249–​51, 255 faciality 292 faeces (faecopoetics) 208–​9, 213, 214 faith 213, 273, 274 fantasy genre 358, 359 fathers/​fatherhood 236–​7, 284–​6, 289 Faye, Guillaume 33, 344–​5, 350, 351–​2, 353, 354 femininity 68, 182, 185 flatness 212, 213, 359, 364 superflatness 189–​94 flesh 227, 228–​9 Black 28–​9, 270, 305 blood and 262–​4 and body 260, 265, 270–​2, 286 distinction between 228–​9, 240–​1 transition between 8, 28–​9, 252, 258 conceptualisation/​imposition of 270–​1 definitions of 260–​1 hieroglyphics of 265–​6 white 29, 264–​6 Ford, Derek R. 375 forgetting 116 Foucault, Michel 31, 326, 352, 359 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye 69, 184, 276, 321

134

Index fragilisation 119 fragility (fragiliacs) 15–​21, 75–​7, 354 white 15–​16, 25, 119, 368–​72, 376, 377 frames/​framing 100–​3, 110, 118 Francis of Assisi 353 Frankenberg, Ruth 5 Frenchness 74 Freud, Sigmund 112, 158 Friedman, Jamie 264 Frink, Elisabeth 321 Gates, Kelly A. 231, 331 Gaylord, Alan T. 182, 185, 195, 201, 214 gaze/​gazing 190, 192, 229, 240, 287–​8 coded 231–​3, 241, 242, 244 Geary, Patrick J. 351 Geiler of Kaiserberg 138 Gelling, Margaret 70 gender 65, 68, 185 see also femininity; masculinity Gendler, Tamar Szabó 316 gentillesse 320, 324 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 56 geontopower 32, 33, 237–​8, 341–​2 Gesta Romanorum 151 ghosts 87, 90–​2, 94 Gilbert, Jane 291 Giles of Rome 236 Gillespie, Vincent 151 God 104, 151, 291 Godden, Malcolm 155 Godden, Richard H. 13 Goffman, Erving 250 Goodrich, Micah 276 governmentality 134, 167, 341, 352, 360, 371

431

Green, Richard Firth 151, 152, 153 Greimas, A. J. 8 grief 63 Grosseteste, Robert 12, 168 Guattari, Félix 249, 251 Guillaume de Conches 161, 162 Guy de Chauliac 236 Hahn, Thomas 4, 31 Haidt, Jonathan 184 Halberstam, Jack 9, 10, 73 Hansen, Elaine 65 Harcourt, Bernard E. 326, 327 Hardt, Michael 94, 137, 353 Harney, Stefano 204, 270, 284, 305, 330, 340, 372 Harris, Cheryl 284 Harris, Daniel 186 Hartman, Saidiya 282 Harvey, P. D. A. 72 haunting 87, 90–​2, 94 Hayward, Eva 9, 164, 168 Heidegger, Martin 247 Hell 23, 141–​5 Heng, Geraldine 5, 31, 212, 264, 265 Hennessy, Marlene Villalobos 150, 152, 157 Herder, Johann Gottfried 311 heroines, courtly 56–​8 Hetoum (Heyton of Corycus) 3 hierarchies 12, 190, 194, 196, 310 Hill, Mike 3, 10, 345 Hilmo, Maidie 258 historiography 309, 311 Hoang, Linh-​Yen, Wrong Asian 315–​16, 318, 327, 330 hold, the 204, 211, 212, 228, 305–​6, 321–​5 periodising 327, 329

432

Index

hold, the (continued) of race 210, 211, 212–​13 horizontality 190, 194, 197–​9, 359 Hoskins, Janet 92 Huang, Yunte 367 Hugh of Lincoln 211, 212–​13 Huizinga, Johan 311, 312 humanity perceived lack of 254–​5 recognition of 285–​6, 291 technology and 247–​8 humoral theory 6, 7 Humphrey, Chris 94 ‘I would be Clad in Christis Skin’ (lyric) 156–​7, 162 iconoclasm 274, 275, 276–​7 Identitarianism 342–​7, 350–​3, 354 identity 2, 8, 97, 138–​9, 144, 314 formation 16, 287–​8 national 50, 74 performance and 132 white 344, 7, 320 Identity Evropa (American Identity Movement) 342–​3, 344, 346–​7, 349, 350 idols/​idolatry 272–​6, 286 ignorance 132, 135, 136, 139 illumination 18, 23–​4, 105, 144 imperialism 13, 209, 352 implication 307, 330 inanimacy 238, 261–​2, 269 indexicality 9, 231, 232, 313, 331 Ingham, Patricia Clare 325 Innocent IV, Pope 135 instrumentalism 169, 274–​5 integument 160–​2 interiority 146, 157

interpellation 62–​3, 245, 253, 255, 257–​8, 292, 308, 367–​9 failures of 24, 368 vs implication 307, 330, 331, 377 partial 316 religious 245, 252, 257 Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Buried Giant 354–​65, 372–​3, 376–​7 Isidore of Seville 52 Islam 1, 2, 227–​8, 272–​6 Islamophobia 2, 279 Jackson, Lauren Michele 369, 370, 371 Jacob, Christian 51, 52, 60, 61, 62 Jacopo de Voragine 92 Jameson, Fredric 331 Jastrow, Joseph 249 Jay, Martin 232 Jephson, John Mounteney 325 ‘Jesu, Redemptor omnium’ (hymn) 150 Jews/​Jewishness 144, 145, 169, 210, 214 blindness, ascribed to 132, 134–​41 bodies of 168 as Other 134, 167 precaritisation of 166–​9 John of Grimestone 156 John, Saint 100 Johnson, Hannah 211 Jones, Amelia 239 Jordan, William Chester 4 jouissance 96, 97, 100, 109, 117 Julian of Norwich 104 Kao, Wan-​Chuan 354–​6, 367–​8

334

Index Kato, Norihiro 209 Katz, David 18–​19, 88 Kazanjian, David 74 Kearney, Richard 260, 265 Keen, Suzanne 307, 309 Keener, Alison 376 King of Tars, The (romance) 1–​3, 7, 8, 24, 227–​93 anti-​Black violence 278–​9 biontology in 32 conversion in 245–​7, 253, 270–​2, 277–​8 dorsal turn in 247–​9 dreams in 267–​9 editions/​versions 268, 269, 292 geontopower in 237–​8, 241, 242 iconoclasm 274, 275, 276–​7 idols/​idolatry 272–​6 mothers/​motherhood in 287–​93 Otherness in 251–​2 plot 233–​4 racialisation in 229–​30, 252–​3, 255–​6, 262 reception 236–​7 recognition in 240–​2 settler colonialism in 291 systemic edge in 228–​30 tropology of 245–​6 whiteness in 264–​6 whitening in 278–​83 King, Pamela M. 142 Kirk, M. L. 321 Kökeritz, Helge 72 Kopytoff, Igor 92 Kowaleski, Maryanne 148 Krause, F. 268 Kruger, Steven F. 134, 135, 271, 310

433

labour 22, 93–​4, 138, 139, 144, 148–​9 affective 16, 19, 89, 94, 95, 112–​14 erased history of 87, 115–​16, 117, 119 Lacan, Jacques 62, 103, 110, 112, 287 object a 95–​6, 103, 117 S (Ø) 97, 100 Lamarre, Thomas 192, 197, 207 Lampert, Lisa 268 Lanfrank of Milan 260, 263 Langland, William, Piers Plowman 7, 131–​2, 133, 134–​49 blindness and 134–​7 Christ’s body/​skin in 154, 145–​7, 163 Jewish difference in 137–​41 medieval drama and 141–​2 Lanier, Sidney 347 Lanzoni, Susan 308 lap 306, 310–​12, 317, 321–​5 Lavezzo, Kathy 74, 213 Le Goff, Jacques 312, 315, 330 Le Guin, Ursula 358 leather (whit lether) 148–​9 Lee, Robert E. 347, 348 Léglu, Catherine E. 97 Lerer, Seth 199 Levinas, Emmanuel 251, 252 Liber Apolloni de secretis nature (text) 23 liberalism 352, 373–​4 life bare (zoē) 137, 138, 145 vs nonlife 237–​8 zoē vs bíos 137, 138 light 18, 23–​4, 105, 144 Lipps, Theodor 308

434

Index

Little, Arthur L. 282, 284 Little, Lester 93 localisation 50, 61–​2, 74 Lomuto, Sierra 264 Longinus 132, 134, 136–​9, 145, 152, 163, 169 Loomba, Ania 4, 313 López, Alfred J. 38, 150 Lorenz, Konrad 182, 184 Lorey, Isabell 25–​6, 165–​6 loss 74–​5, 90, 283–​4 defaute 49, 51, 60 finding and 96 unlost 69–​74 love 183, 184, 374 courtly 76, 95–​6, 103, 119, 198, 344 Luciano, Dana 238, 239, 240 Lucifer 145 Ludolph of Saxony 150 Lydgate, John 327 Macclesfield Psalter 236 Machaut, Guillaume de 54, 56, 68, 310 Macrobius 161, 268 Mandeville’s Travels 3, 7, 12–​13, 243 mapping 51, 52, 53, 61, 66 body, relationship with 54–​8 of points 107–​8 and subjectivity 60–​2 vs writing 71–​2 Marcus, Sharon 231 Margaret, Saint 92 marginality 100, 101–​2 Markell, Patchen 291 Mary, Virgin 150 masculinity 3, 65–​6, 77, 188, 189, 198–​9, 348 masks 132, 143, 144, 371 Massey, Doreen 66 Massumi, Brian 18, 86, 88, 359

Al-​Mas’udi 7 materiality 22, 38, 90–​2 of air 375 elemental 238 human 228 of idols 273 of love-​object 112–​13 nonhuman 362 Matthews, David 313 McNamer, Sarah 309 McWhorter, John 370 medievalism 33, 341, 342, 343, 347, 348, 350–​3 Melamed, Jodi 373, 374, 376 melancholia 62, 282–​4 Melville, Stephen 160 memorialisation 49, 51 memory 16–​19, 52–​4, 66–​8, 87, 88 loss of 360, 361, 364–​5 mnemonic chain/​catena 58–​9, 113–​14 Merish, Lori 183 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 91, 260–​1 metonymy 96, 97 Mezzadra, Sandro 11 microaggression 315, 316, 356 Middle Ages, definitions of 312, 328–​9 Miller, Margaret A. 364 Milner, Stephen J. 97 Milton, John 327, 328 Minnis, Alastair 63, 64 mirrors 256–​7, 272, 287, 289–​91 misrecognition 315–​16, 318 Mitchell, J. Allan 203 Mitchell, Peta 364 Mitchell, W. J. T. 116, 274 modernity 190, 305–​6, 313, 361, 362 Mongols 3, 12, 13–​14, 30, 367

534

Index Moriaen 7 Morrison, Karl F. 246, 309 Morrison, Toni 4 Morse, Victoria 61 Moten, Fred 204, 270, 284, 305, 330, 340, 372 mothers/​motherhood 183, 206, 236–​7, 284–​6, 287–​93 motion see movement mourning 16, 19, 74–​5, 88–​9, 99, 112–​14, 117–​18 movement 109 affective economy and 113 contre-​practice 326–​7 downward 317–​18 flow 213 horizontal 197–​9 see also turns multitude (Hardt & Negri) 137, 145, 179, 361 Muñoz, José Esteban 118, 119 Murakami, Takashi 189–​92 727 191, 192 DOB totem pole 192 Murphy, Michelle 375 nakedness 147, 154 names/​naming 51–​4, 70–​3, 312 narcissism 70, 71, 257, 371, 374 desire and 112, 116 inverted 256, 257, 273, 278 nationalism 5, 351, 352, 354 nativism 348 Negri, Antonio 137, 353 Neilson, Brett 11 neoconservatism 353 neofascism 350 neoliberalism 204, 353 neomedievalism 350–​2, 353–​4 Nerad, Julie Cary 314 New Jerusalem 99–​100 Newman, Paul B. 140

435

Ngai, Sianne 181, 182, 186, 187, 203 Nicholas of Cusa 111–​12 North, Stella 256 nostalgia 345, 347, 350 Nott, George 325 N-​Town Crucifixion play 167 Nyong’o, Tavia 330 object relations 21–​2, 110, 274–​5, 286, 290 objectification 203, 211 objects 13, 30, 90–​2, 113, 205, 274 affect and 116, 117 bad 274, 290 biography of 92–​3 desire and 95–​6 Lady–​Objects (Žižek) 95, 97, 103, 112–​13 object a (Lacan) 95–​6 transitional 206–​7 Odo of Cheriton 151 Oldenburg, Ray 203 Opicinus de Canistris 54–​6 Orientalism 306, 307, 325 Other/​Otherness 4–​6, 100, 145, 166, 251–​3, 290, 330 Jewishness as 137–​9 Lacanian 62, 97 racialised 318, 354–​6 radical 112–​13 outbreak narrative 363–​4 Page, Thomas Nelson 347 pain 158, 318–​19 Panofsky, Erwin 110–​11, 328, 330 Pappano, Margaret Aziza 144 Parable of the Vineyard 93–​4, 106 parergon (Derrida) 100–​3, 118 parturition (male) 65–​6

436

Index

passing 306, 312–​16, 318 Passion drama 140–​1, 146, 148 Patterson, Lee 182, 188 Paul, Saint (Saul) 134, 135, 245 PCRS see premodern critical race studies pearl (material) 22–​3, 87, 97, 107, 114–​16 Pearl (poem) 7, 18, 23, 86–​119 colour in 87–​9 desire in 94–​103 material labour in 115–​16 medieval economy in 93–​4 memory in 113–​14 objects in 90–​3 point (poynt/​punctum) in 104–​12 radical Otherness in 112–​13 spatiality in 99–​100 Pearsall, Derek 64, 155, 171 perception of colour 18, 88, 149–​50 performance 132–​3, 141–​2, 145, 159–​60, 166, 371 performatives 76, 314, 315, 328, 331, 371 performativity 156, 199, 314 periodisation 305, 306, 307, 312–​16, 318, 325–​31, 349 Perryman, Judith 268 perspective 98, 99–​100, 108, 110–​11, 190, 191, 328 Peter Alfonsi 135, 271 Peter Damian 135 Peter Denies Jesus (play) 140 Phruksachart, Melissa 373, 377 place displacement 69–​74, 75, 212, 228 elsewheres 62, 66, 74, 95, 119 ‘the third place’ 203–​4 placelessness 107

Platonism 97 Pliny the Elder 115 point (poynt/​punctum) 104–​12 Polo, Marco 13, 14 Postles, David 83 postraciality 364, 365 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 30–​2, 213, 237, 281–​2, 316, 341 power see biopolitics; geontopower precariat 350, 353 precaritisation 166–​9 precarity 21–​6, 133–​4, 165–​9, 345, 368–​9 white 25, 368, 369 premodern critical race studies (PCRS) 31–​4, 307 premodernity 29, 34, 282, 313–​14, 329 pricking 189, 197, 198–​9 privilege 10, 119, 144, 284, 313, 370 Privity of the Passion, The 152 Probyn, Elspeth 62 proper, the 69–​74 property 69, 70, 71–​2, 283–​6, 342 propriety of discourse 70–​1 Prosser, Jay 157 proximity 94–​103, 163–​4 Pseudo-​Cicero 67 Puar, Jasbir 166 public secrecy 254–​5, 275, 288 Pugh, Tison 366 Purdie, Rhiannon 194 purity 22, 92, 213, 341, 349 Putter, Ad 195 queer inhumanism 240, 244, 249 queerness 188–​9, 286 race 200 biologising of 32

734

Index classification systems 4 colour and 6–​7, 29, 31 denial of 119 ethnicity and 351 facial recognition technology and 232 in medieval scholarship 4–​6 passing 306, 313–​16 periodisation and 328–​9 racialicity 34, 329, 330 racialisation 28–​30, 32–​3, 210, 229 in The King of Tars 229–​30, 255–​6, 262 periodisation and 305, 306, 307, 314, 325 toxicity and 361 as turn 252–​3, 258, 292, 293 through whiteness 320–​1 racialism 342, 345, 348, 353 raciality 27–​8, 364, 365 racism 4, 33, 204, 232, 342, 361, 365, 367 antiracism 365, 373–​4, 375 Rancière, Jacques 242 readers 157, 182, 196–​7 see also audience reading 231, 233, 261, 290–​1, 292, 373–​4 recognition 240–​2, 261, 262, 291, 306, 314, 330 cross-​racial recognition deficit (CRRD) 316 cunning of 280–​2, 316 facial recognition technology 231–​3, 342 failures of 315–​16, 318 relationality 11, 371–​2 religion 25, 93, 229 see also baptism; Christianity; conversion; Islam; revelation; salvation

437

Renaissance 312, 313, 328 see also early modern period reproduction 236–​7, 286 Reuter, Timothy 351 revelation 162, 254, 280 Rice, Nicole R. 144 Richard, Frances 209 Riddy, Felicity 116, 197 Rider, Jeff 311 Rolle, Richard 104, 146, 152 Roman de Silence 6 romance 193–​4, 199, 203, 205, 212, 258 objects 274, 321–​4 Roosevelt, Teddy (Theodore) 348 Rosenwein, Barbara 321 Rowland, Beryl 187 Rubin, Miri 152 ruses 249, 253, 256, 270, 272, 278, 280, 281, 293 Sacks, Oliver 231, 241 sacrifice 276–​7 Said, Edward 307 Salter, Elizabeth 101 salvation 23–​4, 92, 155, 276 San Marino, Huntington MS El 26.C.9 (Ellesmere) 194 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 163 Sassen, Sakia 8, 228, 277 Satan 142, 143, 144 Schade, Julia 372 Schultz, James A. 76 Sedelius, ‘O solis ortus cardine’ 150 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 34, 65 selfhood 2, 100–​3, 132, 158, 246, 287–​8 Serres, Michel 33, 49, 51, 54, 179, 330 shame 180, 207, 214, 249

438

Index

Sherman, Gary D. 184 Shih, Shu-​Mei 204, 212 shock 261, 262 signification 17, 28, 62, 71, 97, 205 Simpkins, Reese 9 Singer, Tania 318 singularities 137, 179 sinking 204, 213 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 358 Skeat, Walter W. 72 skin of Christ 150–​7 as costume 146 Jewskin 168 porosity 133 tones, theories of formation of 6 trauma and 157 as veil 160–​2 white, representations of 7 whiteness as 131–​3 whitening of 2, 278–​83 of words 160 Skin Ego 133, 158–​60, 162 Sloterdijk, Peter 359, 362–​3, 364, 373, 375 Smail, Daniel 71, 72 smallness 182, 185–​6 Smith, D. Vance 88 Smith, Nigel 329 Snediker, Michael D. 188, 206 Snider, Stefanie 240 somatechnics 247, 293 ‘Song of Love-​longing to Jesus, A’ (poem) 146 Southern pastoralism 36 sovereignty 31, 342, 351, 352, 353 space domestic 206–​7 homogenous 110 inside/​outside 146, 162, 164, 372

surrounds 340, 341, 342, 372 ‘the third place’ 203–​4 spatialisation 49, 51 spatiality 75, 107–​8 Spearing, A.C. 64 spectrality 87, 90–​2, 94 Spencer, Richard 348, 349 Spenser, Edmund 327 Spillers, Hortense J. 28–​9, 228, 240, 265, 270, 272 Sponsler, Claire 144 squeeze/​squeezing 193, 179, 180, 186–​8, 195–​6, 204 stainlessness 107, 109 Stanbury, Sarah 91, 109, 116 Standing, Guy 350 Star, Sarah 262 Steinberg, Leo 147 Steiner, Emily 155 Stella Mary Newton 148 Stephens, Michelle Ann 28 Stern, Daniel 368 stickiness 199–​200, 205 Stiegler, Bernard 247 stillness 230, 238, 261–​2, 269 Stoicism 97 stones 238–​41, 242–​3, 260–​1 strangers/​strangeness 282 stretching 12, 150–​2, 167–​9 Strutt, Joseph 140 stuckness 75–​6 subjectivity 50, 60–​9, 70, 76–​7, 159, 190, 287–​8 trauma and 109, 159 subjects objects, relationship with 110–​11 white melancholic 282–​4 suffering 155, 156, 157–​64, 166 Sullivan, Nikki 247, 275 superflatness 189–​94

934

Index surfaces 112, 116–​17, 158, 207, 231–​3 Surin, Kenneth 254 surrounds 340, 341, 342, 372 Swanson, Heather 148 sweetness 199–​201, 205 Synagoga (allegorical figure) 136 systemic edge 8, 228–​9, 262, 277 Szpiech, Ryan 246 Tacitus 115 taste 37, 199–​201, 205, 207 Taussig, Michael 254, 261, 275, 276, 288 teaching 354–​6, 367–​8, 375–​7 technology 7, 247–​8, 269–​70, 275, 276, 352 environmental 352, 353 facial recognition 231–​3, 342 somatechnics 247, 293 theatrical 163 temporality 330, 366 anachronism 328–​9 archives and 113 before 340–​2 body and 228 conversion and 271–​2, 277–​8 future perfect 286 postponement 103 race and 33 reversals of 326 of white supremacism 345 terrorism 359, 362–​3, 364–​5, 372–​3, 377 things see objects Thomas of Chabham 147 time see temporality Titchener, Edward 308–​12 Tomasch, Sylvia 72, 210 Tompkins, Avery 9

439

toponymy 59, 62, 63, 70 touch 182, 199–​200, 205, 260 toxicity 360–​2, 369 trans*ness 9–​10, 133, 165 trauma 113, 117, 118, 157, 209–​10, 211–​12 Travis, Peter 17, 64 Trevisa, John 6, 12, 168, 236 tropes 67, 77, 276, 307, 314, 331, 359 of otherness 166, 352–​3 of the turn 248, 252, 258 visual 132, 324, 325 whiteness as 8, 16, 17, 30, 58 tropology 228, 281 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 25, 369 Tupper, Frederick 72 turns 228, 231, 245, 246–​9, 257–8, 269 dorsal 229, 230, 238, 247–​9, 251–​3, 262, 269 somatechnical 240 of the subject 62, 253 Twycross, Meg 143, 147, 148, 172 Tydeman, William 163 understanding 309 universality 3, 50, 321, 354 untold, the 328 vanishing point 108, 110, 191 veils 135–​6, 139, 154, 160–​2, 371 Vengence et destruction du Hierusalem, La (play) 134 Vernon manuscript 292 Vernon, Matthew 364 violence aggression vs self-​defence 340–​2 anti-​Black 278–​9, 281 of cunning of recognition 281–​2

440

Index

violence (continued) cuteness and 193, 186–​7 discursive 266 of the Passion 140–​1 pre-​emptive 359, 360 of racism 370, 371 religious 227–​8 superflatness and 193 torture 168 of writing 71 virginity 92 vulnerability 183, 185, 186–​7, 188, 207–​8 Wald, Gayle 314 Wald, Priscilla 363 Walker, Kara, A Subtlety 200 Wallace, David 183, 203 Walter, Katie L. 236, 237, 242, 260 Warton, Thomas 325 waste 208–​9, 213, 214 Waters, Claire 210 Watson, Nicholas 309 Watts, V. E. 97 Weheliye, Alexander G. 252, 286 Weinstein, Jami 9, 164, 168 Weisl, Angela 366 Westrem, Scott 59 Whitaker, Cord 5, 31, 268, 278 white supremacism 10, 33, 341, 342–​50, 354

whiteface 212 whiteness 5–​6, 36, 50, 131 albus 16–​17 as habitus 371 definitions of 1, 3–​4, 7–​8 economic value of 92–​3 gradations of 87, 149–​50 meanings of 12, 16, 21–​2, 23–​4 non-​discursive 264–​6 as operation 11–​12, 13 recentering of 370, 371 as white*ness 9–​11, 17, 23, 314, 342 whitening 2, 22–​3, 87, 114–​17, 119, 278–​83 Wilderson, Frank B. 270 Willinger, Markus 343 Wills, David 247, 248–​9, 252, 253, 256, 262, 269, 273 Winnicott, D. W. 206, 209, 230, 287–​8, 289, 290, 311 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21, 131 wounds/​woundedness 117, 163, 199 writing 65–​9, 71–​2, 152–​3 Zeeman, Nicolette 273, 276 Žižek, Slavoj 91, 103, 112–​13