In her preface to VM Jane Bennett seeks to expose a ‘vital materiality’ that she compares to “childhood experiences” in “a worlid populated by animate things rather than passive objects” (vii). How can medieval or middle English texts like Guigmar and Sir Clegus be examined in terms of this adolescent mindset? The medieval world seems to be ridden with “engagements with vibrant matter and intelligible things” (viii)–like the hind in Guigmar or the concept of fortune or virtue in Sir Clegus, where wealth is the driving force of fate. Is the modern mindset more or less open to objects as possessing a vitality?
ENGL 365 | Medieval Object Ecologies
Dr. Myra Seaman | Fall 2014
I’m going to have to say less, much less. However, I do want to point out that works like Guigemar and Sir Cleges can’t be considered representative of medieval views on the vitality of objects per se, since they are tales rather than treatise on this matter. If we look at some contemporary fiction, we can see a lot of this type of human/object interaction (pretty much anything by Salman Rushdie is rife with this kind of thing).
I do think in our current world this idea is a hard sell. There is a lot of history behind the us vs. everything else worldview. Especially against an acknowledgement of agency in anything besides a human or (possibly) an animal. One thing she writes really calls this sort of reaction into question: “Without proficiency in this countercultural kind of perceiving, the world appears as if it consists only of active human subjects who confront passive objects and their law-governed mechanisms” (xiv). It is fairly obvious that it’s not just humans and a bunch a passive objects here. Things do affect us; storms are an especially good example of this. (In this respect, we do a lot of anthropomorphizing. Down to naming storms with common human names.)
While I do think this is going to be met with a lot of skepticism, it’s apparent that not all of the activity of a given object can viewed from the standpoint of how it affects its human counterparts. And the idea of a sort of latent thing-power is very intriguing to me.
Well, for example, the ship that took Guigmar to the lady’s island couldn’t have been a passive object, but an animate force that pushed the story along. Likewise can be said about the cherries in Sir Cleges’ story. They grew unnaturally during the cold season, and thus had to have some sort of sentient force behind them, whether that was a higher power or the Earth itself. Despite how radical Bennett’s views are on thing-power, there is something to be said for the power of certain objects and symbols in the texts thus far.
I do believe that our propensity to give objects a life-like vitality has changed since the times of Sir Cleges and Guigemar. A lot of this has to do with scientific discoveries about the stuff that matter is made of and a less inventive way of looking at the history of religion and messianic objects. In stories from Medieval times, objects are given life and progressive abilities because symbolic objects – such as Guigemar’s enchanted boat – had to ability to progress a story in a way that characters could not. Not only were objects added to move a story in the direction that the author wanted but objects moved entirely on their own accord, not driven by the hand of a higher power (except for maybe Fate). I think that the emphasis on symbolic objects in medieval literature comes close to giving objects the significance and life that Bennett is talking about. In many instances, however the objects that Cleges interacts with and give life-like qualities and importance too seem to be divinely associated. I am not sure that this is necessarily what Bennett means when she is talking about object vitality – given that, at the end of her preface she specifically states that she aims to “detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance.” The modern reader would be very hesitant to allow objects to possess vitality if they are not divinely infused because as a human I think that we aim to find meaning in anything that is alive, and a live object would bring up many philosophical issues, as well as realistic issues.
I think in Guigemar and Sir Cleges there is a sort of mysticism surrounding some non-human objects which is no longer as common in the modern mindset. The cherries, for example, in Sir Cleges has thing power as a divine phenomenon. The medieval tendency to attribute the supernatural to common objects seems superstitious from the modern perspective, but is is this superstition that give vital power to non-human objects. The role of fate or fortune in both Guigemar and Sir Cleges reveals a lack of human power which contrast with the modern assumption of human power over nature. In Guigemar the hind at first seems to be another instance of humans’ power as hunter, but then it is the hind who really hold the power after she curses Guigemar. The hind is also anthropomorphized into a thing with a human voice. This seems to detract from the hind’s identity as an object and makes her an actual subject. It seems to me that in focusing so much on objects there is a tendency to make them subjects and that this is what Bennett wants us to do.