Mandeville's Thought of the Limit

Mandeville’s Thought of the Limit: The Discourse of Similarity and Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville
By Sebastian Sobecki, for Review of English Studies (2002)

Any article which uses the word “epistemology” in every paragraph is guaranteed to give me a headache.

Okay, so Sobecki is concerned with Foucault and the term “transgression” as it applied to literature’s experience of Self and Other. For Sobecki’s purposes, “‘Transgression’ denotes the movement of crossing the limit between that which is known or familiar to us, the Same, and that which is unknown or does not want to be known, the Other” (330). By that definition, one might consider that “Travelling is transgression. A travel narrative, even if it portrays a purely imaginary voyage, is the verbalization and textualization of transgression, of the crossing of borders and limits” (330).

So, without getting into the questions of Mandeville’s identity or the truthfulness of the narrative, we can consider the Travels to be a transgressive act that brings readers into contact with critical questions of Selfhood – and of Otherness. Sobecki pays detailed attention to the ways in which Mandeville adheres to medieval conventions in this regard, and which aspects of his narrative mark important departures that signal the beginning of a cultural shift toward modern ideas of the Self/Other binary:

“. . . medieval writers’ categories of perception frequently reflect group values and group tendencies to assert auctoritas for themselves. Their so-called ‘lack of originality’ and their routine invocation of past masters are expressions of their own ‘anxiety of influence’” (331). This mentality is reflected in the understanding of the Other: “‘Originality’, the unorthodox, the new, the dangerous – all those are names for the Other, which poses a permanent threat to cultures still in the process of consolidating their identity” (331). Europe boasts just such a culture, especially since it is “organized by a superstructural ideology . . . religion” (331).

And so, we have Mandeville, and his voyage – and act of transgression – that causes his readers, wrapped comfortably in their selfhood, to butt up against the alarming Other. In this context, “Reading becomes the psychological medium for the complex encounter with one’s macrospatial world view” (331), and “the narrative persona [of Mandeville] experiences the Other representatively for the reader” (331).

“In the Travels, the secret limit at the heart of transgression is permeable from both sides of the divide. With astonishing ease, Mandeville presents the limit not as a border between the mutually exclusive ‘us’ and ‘them’, but as a point at which cultural exchange is possible” (334). This is one of the key points at which Mandeville departs from the conventions observed by his predecessors and contemporaries alike. “This cultural dialogue is grounded in Mandeville’s enormous talent for empathy with the heavily stereotyped and even imagined Other” (334).

Where does the Other exist? The cultures Mandeville encounters (and the spaces they inhabit) have been described by some scholars as ‘mirror societies’; however, this term is problematic, as it assumes “an inversion of one’s own society” (334). This is not what Mandeville presents. Rather, “They are by far more complex in structure in purpose, and they illustrate a whole range of theological and moral concerns immediate to Mandeville’s contemporaries rather than simply mirroring Western Christendom” (334).

In bringing the reader to a point of exchange with Otherness, Mandeville employs the “brilliant stratagem of inverting the roles of reader and text” (338). Understanding the Other as represented in the text leads to an inevitable reflection on Self. “The result is a lateral shift in the experience of reading the text from ‘I read the text’ Mandeville takes his reader to ‘the text reads me’. This transition from reader-as-reader to reader-as-text forms part of the reversal of the subject (similarity) and the object (difference) of the intricate grammar of the Travels’ epistemological discourse” (338). The resulting intimacy of Self and Other creates a different space from that existing within other travel narratives.

Sobecki points to an important example that illustrates Mandeville’s means of approaching the Other which also happens to overlap with my botanical interest in the text. This relates to Mandeville’s language in the passage in which he introduces the reader to the concept of bananas. No term yet exists for this specific object, though obvious words suggest themselves that would give readers a simple understanding – for example, as Sobecki suggests, he might have referred to them as “yellow fruit”. However, rather than relating bananas in terms that embellish their strangeness or blandly generalize them, he seeks similarities between the known and the similar, and the exotic (in this case, the banana). So it is that he makes bananas into a Christian symbol, which displays in its center the Holy Cross. So it is than an exotic object, on the one hand representing the Other, becomes in Mandeville’s narrative a link to the Self as well.

This is consistent throughout the Travels: “Instead of propagating difference Mandeville stresses similarity. He draws a map of our limitations as every encounter with the Other generously contributes to more clarify on the mappa mundi of medieval epistemology” (342). Further, “This shift from the episteme of difference . . . to the new and more self-confident episteme of curiositas, which does not attempt to explain away the Other as a menace to religious and political stability, underlies Mandeville’s astonishing encounters with foreign cultures. Curiositas urges the traveller to explore the limits and to engage willingly with the Unknown” (342).

Today is no different, really. It’s the difference between a business trip, a package vacation, a “humanitarian holiday” and a solo backpacker setting out with a one-way ticket. Your purpose and your personal philosophy dictate, at least, what kind of traveller you become – though I’m not clever enough to say how they speak to our modern culture. At the end of the day, I hope I can be a Mandeville and not a Margery, and as I turn my thoughts to my next foray into new places, I hope my transgressive acts push the limits between Self and Other and allow me to feel out the shape of the Unknown – even if I secretly still believe it’s Unknowable.

Science and the Sense of Self (article)

Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation
By Lynn White Jr., for Daedalus (1978)

This article is a bit heady, but is mostly comprised of a discussion of the medieval conceptions of nature, the individual and the sacred, and the origins of scientific thought in Europe. It makes some interesting notes on the desacralization of nature that speak to the world culture inherited by Mandeville.

One of the early interesting discussions concerns the Law of Nature as articulated by Roger Bacon. This Law is “inherent in God’s purpose for all his creatures” (48) and “God is chiefly praised by the perfection with which his creatures exist according to the laws that he has established for and in them” (48). This may be a stretch, but I think that the mark of Christ on pre-Christian nature and peoples may be evidence of the same.

White marks a cultural shift from pagan to Christian values as they prevail in wider society, a shift that dramatically changes how people conceive of nature. While it forms the foundation of pagan beliefs, which celebrate the spirits of place and animistic power, nature is desacralized through “belief in an all-powerful and absolutely transcendent God” (49). In Judaism and, later, Christianity, nature is mastered – not worshipped.

As White notes, “Since they awaited the end of the world momentarily, the early Christians had little interest in science, the study of something that would shortly turn to ashes” (49). However, this thought is part of an interesting sequence. Though the lasting import of science is undermined, it remains a marker, in some sense, of Christ’s presence in the world (through study of nature). A false dichotomy is created between the natural and the sacred. Or, nature and natural objects are not permitted to be sacred in themselves – only in the degree to which they manifest Christ within them.

But as nature is desacralized, and natural spaces and wilderness, the desecration of what is pristine and wild is normalized through essentially violent and disruptive acts such as pilgrimage and crusades and expansion of civilization. Intrusion into wilderness, which has been robbed of its animistic power, becomes a means of empowering (falsely but demonstratively) the Christian faith.

This weird suspension between the sacred and profane in the power granted to nature creates an uncomfortable space for Mandeville to inherit in his discussion of nature and natural objects in the Travels. He is, in effect, a secular traveler (though he does discuss pilgrimage and revelation); his purpose is not to edify but delight, and many of the most compelling elements of his narrative are natural ones. He is not part of “the great waves of pilgrims . . . who swept eastward to experience for themselves the dust and heat and thirst of the roads of Palestine, and who walked the Via Dolorosa on bloody knees” (52).

He is not clearly part of the crowed who asserted that “Piety demanded empirical experience” (52). But he walks a fine line between reason and revelation that serves as an early enough marker of an important schism in Western thought and culture. One could locate that schism earlier in the works of philosophers, theologians and scientific thinkers, but I think its clear manifestation in literature is more telltale of its prevalence in the wider culture.

Shit, this makes my head hurt.

The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb (article)

The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb
By Berthold Laufer, for The Journal of American Folklore (1915)

Every time I read an article by Berthold Laufer, I feel like I've been schooled.

Anyway:
Laufer's article begins with an assessment of the legends concerning pinna, named in some Chinese myths (in the Later Han Dynasty, for example, AD 25-220) as "water-sheep" (103). The pinna is a type of mollusc, rooted to a particular spot on the sea bed by threadlike filaments called byssi. The molluscs were a source of pearls and meat, and the byssi were spun into a fine golden cloth of surpassing beauty.

The pinna's importance is well-documented, and its function in the production of textiles has Hellenistic roots.

Aristotle mentions the pinna in a discourse on the hierarchy of the living world: though he places plants below animals in the spectrum of living things, within the realm of plants there is a hierarchy too. Some plants are closer than others to the rank of animals - particularly those living in the sea which exhibit animal characteristics (106). To show the occasional difficulty in discerning between plant and animal, Aristotle points to the pinna: "devoid of motion, [the pinna] is rooted like a plant to a fixed spot, and must perish when detached from its intrenchment." Tricky thing: it exhibits both plant and animal characteristics.

The pinna has a strong presence in early literature, mentioned by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, Aelian and others. It also has a strong presence in Chinese and Arabic legends. For Laufer, the transformation in legend to a terrestrial vegetable lamb simply "represents a metamorphosis of the biological condition of the" pinna" (117). His foundation for discussing the terrestrial vegetable lamb is sound, and bears repeating:

"I propose to examine this curious legend without any bias toward speculations which have previously been advanced" (116). And, "The student of folk-lore and the trained observer will be conscious of two points, - first that the germ of a fact or observation relative to natural history underlies the legend; and, second, that, as not all its constituents can satisfactorily be explained from natural events, it must have been construed with a certain end in view, which may have an allegorical purport or religious cause" (116).

Religious cause, hoo boy, just wait until he kicks off his discussion of some Talmudic texts and Syrian Christian symbolism. Anyway! Before we get there...

Now, Laufer first does a neat little pirouette and discusses the wide range of Chinese and other texts that discuss the vegetable lamb. Beyond the early legend of the water-sheep (pinna), and serving as a "continuation or further development of it" (115), we have a tradition in the Annals of the T'ang Dynasty (618-906). Here, "There are lambs engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to sprout, and then build enclosures around as a preventative measure for wild beasts that might rush in from outside to devour them" (115). These lambs are attached to the ground by an umbilical cord which, if forcibly severed, will kill the lamb. However, if the lambs separate themselves naturally from their "stalk", they become free animals. But it's key that the separation is instigated by the lamb itself.

Thus, when the men are ready for the lambs to be separated, in some versions of the legend they storm the pens on horseback bearing swords and shouting to frighten the lambs into severing their umbilical cords in order to flee. And interestingly, some Arabic stories around the marine sheep - the pinna - have a neat parallel. They claim that a crustacean predates the pinna, frightening the mollusk into "dropping" its byssi (threads). The crustacean consumes the mollusk, and the threads drift ashore, where they are collected by people and woven into textiles. In this Arabic tradition, the horsemen and the crustaceans, bearing their swords and pincers, serve much the same function.

Through this sort of metamorphoses of legends from sea-lamb to terrestrial zoophyte, Laufer also connects the pinna and the land-based vegetable lamb to a figure found in the Talmud that takes the form of a man that is connected to the ground by a stalk and stem. Where he takes it next breaks my brain:

The Talmudic text (the Mishna Kilaim, VIII, 5) refers to adne sadeh (translated by Laufer as "lords of the field"). In a commentary on this passage, Rabbi Simeon (d. 1235) claims this creature is "the man of the mountain", which "draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord: if its navel be cut, it cannot live" (120). Further, one Rabbi Meir claims there is an animal that "issues from the earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects . . . [it] has a human form" (120), and "As far as the stem (or umbilical cord) stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies" (120).

How do we interpret this? Says Laufer, speaking of symbolism in the Syrian Christian tradition, this Talmudic "man of the mountain" figure "unquestionably represents an illusion to the 'Divine Lamb standing on Mount Sion'" (121). However, "It is inconceivable that Christ should have been conceived as a lamb immovably rooting in the soil" (121).

Rather, ". . . it was the faithful who were thus depicted, either as the retinue of the Good Pastor, or enjoying the delights of Paradise after their Salvation. Essentially, the "lambs" are devotees, and the "umbilical cord" represents their attachment to earthly pleasures. The "lambs" are threatened by "beasts" (temptations) and can be protected by a "shepherd" (Christ) only to a point: they must ultimately save themselves by cutting the tether of their own umbilical cord (an act that cannot be performed on their behalf without killing them, as we see in the vegetable lamb/pinna legend). The "mounted horsemen" that frighten the "lambs" into freeing themselves actually represent the Last Judgment, and the severance of the "umbilical cord" frees them for redemption into Heaven.

Heavy shit.

However, as Laufer points out, the spiritual drift of the sacred Syrian allegory had long sunk into oblivion" (125) by the time Odoric and Mandeville were writing about the vegetable lamb. As both medieval travelers locate their vegetable lambs in Asia and offer a "worthy counterpart" (125) to the contemporaneous Chinese version, Laufer draws a connection between the two that has Odoric and Mandeville merely modifying an existing Oriental legend.

Interestingly, Laufer is quite vehement in his disgracing of Henry Lee (author of The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: a Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant). The main points of his attack are (1) the fact that cotton production was well-known in Asia and Europe and an unlikely thing for people to widely mistake, and (2) his assessment takes into account only European legends and not the wealth of Asian ones. Still, he credits Lee with undoing the fable that the source of the vegetable lamb legend is in the manipulated rhizomes of a fern tree.

All in all, a long, frighteningly rigorous article. To read Laufer with Lee is to get a more balanced idea of how the legend grew in Asia and Europe respectively, and how the legends were received, modified and embellished as cultural objects. I'll write about Lee's booklet soon.