Abstract
This essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the weird realism of fictional figures which possess something like the vibrant ‘thing-power’ – a sort of quasi-force to persist in existing – that Jane Bennett argues ‘refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge’?
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Notes
See Latour (2004), 245–248.
For Bennett, considering the ‘vibrant’ power of things is to ultimately ‘think’ objects outside of their traditional roles ‘as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert’ and to invent (dream?) for objects a lively ontology of ‘vital materiality’ in which things ‘act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ outside of human will and human designs (Bennett, 2010, vii, viii).
The folkloric roots of Griselda's story have been extensively traced; see Cate (1932), Griffith (1931), and Severs (1942), 229–248.
On the important relations between a certain symbolic economy of ‘courtly love,’ the phallocentric Law, sadism, subjection, masochism, self-sacrifice, jouissance, and the ‘gift’ of death (often of women and queers), see Cohen (1999), Fradenburg (2002), and Gaunt (2006).
All citations of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale are from Benson's edition (1987), by line number. All translations are mine.
For overviews (up to 1994) of critical commentary on The Clerk's Tales and its interpretive difficulties, see Bronfman (1994) and Morse (1990).
It should be pointed out that, since von Trier deliberately sets up his heroine as both a fierce believer in God but also, eventually, a heretic in the eyes of the elders of her severely strict church (who consign her to Hell after she dies) and then ‘translates’ her into a sort of saint who performs miracles (Jann's sudden recovery and also the pealing of bells over Jann's ship at the end of the movie), perhaps von Trier sought to locate his portrait of female sanctity outside the symbolic realm of the patriarchal Word and Law (see Žižek, 1999). Nevertheless, the film never entirely escapes a certain traditional theology in which love, figured as the passive and feminized sacrifice of one's own or someone else's life, lies at the heart of Christian belief.
For examples of these types of readings, respectively, see Žižek (1999), Yager (2009), and Miller (2004).
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The title of my paper is drawn from the prefatory note to Graham Harman's essay ‘On Vicarious Causation,’ where he writes that, while the ‘strangeness’ of his theory of vicarious causation ‘may lead to puzzlement more than resistance,’ it ‘is not some autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum’ (Harman, 2007, 187). Conversely, or perversely, this essay seeks to trace just such an autistic trajectory.
By ‘speculative’ reason and also ‘weird’ realism, I mean to invoke the recent work of Graham Harman and other ‘speculative realists’ and ‘object-oriented’ theorists who have been working on non-human-centered and post-‘discursive turn’ and ‘carnal’ materialisms, metaphysics, phenomenologies, and onticologies (where the world is no longer merely the carrier of human signification), and who also hold, following Harman, that ‘[i]ndividual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos,’ and further, ‘[t]hese entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations’ (Harman, 2010a). This group of thinkers is in no way unified in their thinking, but for an excellent introduction to and overview of the history and development of the recent critical turns to ‘speculative realism’ and ‘object-oriented ontology,’ see Harman (2010b). For important individual inflections of speculative and object-oriented philosophies, see Bennett (2010), Bryant (2011), Harman (2005, 2009, 2011), Morton (2010), and Shaviro (2011).
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Joy, E. Like two autistic moonbeams entering the window of my asylum: Chaucer's Griselda and Lars von Trier's Bess McNeill. Postmedieval 2, 316–328 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.20