I don't feel like writing an update today. I am feeling too philosophical and lethargic. But I'm not going to go without posting, because that would be irresponsible!
So, as a compromise, I am reposting, from my Haiti blog, a little note that I wrote about Mandeville from my tent in Croix des Bouquets. In sum, I spent a few weeks in Haiti in June 2010, and aside from all the crushing sadness and beauty of the trip, one of my biggest challenges was settling on what I should bring to read. I settled for Cohen, Rilke and Borges, but I also brought my Mandeville. In the end, I'm glad I did, because I was actually very moved by the experience of reading travel literature while I was traveling and of encountering, understanding and communicating new things in much the same way that Mandeville does in the text.
I include this now because, having read and annotated the first half of the text while in Haiti, I intend to complete my work on that edition during my upcoming travels on the Big Island. So, more reflective drivel to come, I'm sure.
Anyway, from 15 June, my first full day in Haiti:
Mostly I brought poetry, things I can read and reread, but I also brought an old copy of Mandeville’s Travels. It was published in 1919 – so, ninety years ago – and though I didn’t realize it when I bought it, it’s never been read. It’s all in Middle English, which means that I am reading it slowly and savouring every sentence, but it’s also a neat and tactile interaction with my book because I’m sitting with a knife in my lap and cutting the sealed quartos of the book to turn the pages.
For those of you unfamiliar with my obsession of the last nine or ten months, Mandeville’s Travels is a thirteenth century travel narrative detailing the voyage of an English knight through the Holy Land to India and China and back to England again. Though the author adopted “Mandeville” as a pseudonym (pseudopersona?) and essentially plagiarized much of his account, it is rooted in a literary tradition spanning herbals, genuine travel accounts, encyclopedias, hagiography, and many other types of writing.
In his “travels” (or what he represents as his travels), Mandeville describes the places and people he encounters with incredible detail. What seduces me is the botanical narrative, and the rich vegetation that permeates the text. Often one reads descriptions of unusual fruits, plants, exotic animals – things modern travelers still encounter, and still struggle to describe. Now, as I am in a context where I’m doing the same thing – seeing sights I never could have imagined, and rediscovering things (like mangoes!) in their native environment only to realize how different they are...I feel even more of a kinship with Mandeville.
Initially, I found the Travels interesting because Mandeville seems in many senses to share my travel values. That is, the things I most appreciate about traveling and the things I tend to notice strike some people as unusual. I have a passing interest in monuments, historical places, beautiful architecture – but I am more allured by the idea of peoples, the rich variety of culture, and the incredible natural beauty all around me. I tend to spend most of my time examining native flora, overturning stones on the beach to pick out their different qualities, looking at how people interact with their environment in meaningful ways. The Mandevillean style of traveler, even if invented in this text, is totally sensible to me. Especially now, I enjoy vicariously experiencing the exotic, and exploring someone else’s attempt to define it and express it.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, December 17, 2010
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.
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.
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