“No. Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence. Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important.” – John Cheever (From an interview with The Paris Review)
I never developed any concrete expectations for the course. I didn’t read the course description, nor did I take the time to think about what medieval literature would be like. Although I do believe there was a subconscious assumption that it would be similar to the literature I had previously encountered.
I guess because I wasn’t expecting much, the readings shouldn’t have been able to go against what I thought they were going to be like, but they did. Dr Har and my dad both love medieval literature, so I had assumed that I would like it, or at least be able to see profoundness in it. But I was unable to. While reading Lancelot I struggled to view it on the same level as other things I had enjoyed. It felt massively plot based—I remember repeating that it felt like the writing of the time had not yet developed anything other than plot as a form of expression.
Looking back, “Acuteness of feeling and velocity” was exactly what I was expecting from the course. Although I lacked concrete expectations, I still assumed I would be able to do what I had done with nearly every piece of literature I have enjoyed: impose my life and emotions onto the characters. These expectations manifested themselves in my initial readings of passages like this one: “But Love, who held sway within his heart, urged and commanded him to climb into the cart at once. Because Love ordered and wished it, he jumped in; since Love ruled his action, the disgrace did not matter” (212). At the beginning of the term, I wanted The Knight of the Cart to be an acute expression of the complexities associated with being in love. I wanted to read about a troubled knight torn between love and loyalty. I wanted to continue my practice of putting myself at the center of novels and using the characters as mediums to explore my own psyche. But The Knight of the Cart is not that and did not allow me to do those things. My disappointment was valid in that what I was looking for does not exist in medieval literature; the idyllic portrayal of love in The Knight of the Cart was never attempting to be accurate, as humanity is not the focus of Chrétien’s. Just like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which tells the story of “human entanglement in an active, inhuman world” (Cohen), The Knight of the Cart accepts humanity’s minor role in the world.
My vision of an anthropological, homogenous fiction is nonexistent—fiction is simply great writing.
To take a moment in time and contrive greater meaning from it – categorically prove its effects on my psyche - seems to be of the same air that I have begun to avoid this term. I don’t know if I can pick a single moment of mine or of the readings to act as the barrier between a before and after—even if there exists a significant change. The loss of a classmate will affect anybody, yet some significant emotional suppression has prevented me from truly understanding or processing my response. I could not truthfully tell you the thoughts in my head related to Dan, and especially not how those thoughts relate to an aspect of our reading—people around me assume that I understand so much more about myself than I actually do. I go through my life, for the most part, acting on whims, and because of that, it can be difficult to find origins of my actions and changes. What I can do, is understand my current exhibited state and look to my past for what could logically have caused me to be this way. I get scared of doing this, because I’m always afraid I’m creating connections and meaning where none exist. But I have to do it now, otherwise I would have nothing to write about for this essay.
What I have noticed, more so in my actions and what thoughts those actions would indicate than my thoughts and feelings themselves, is an ever so slight shift of focus. I have the very typical narcissism the devours most adolescents—that has not gone away. What has changed is my ability to recognize my own insignificance. I have not been able to completely escape the teenage self-obsession, but every once in a while, more so that before, I am able to contextualize my life. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), Gawain lives his adventure under the assumption that the story revolves around him—someone is trying to kill him, and he is trying to escape that death. But at the end, Gawain and the reader find out that the conflict is far broader than Gawain: Morgan le Fay is testing, “the surfeit of pride / That is rumored of the retinue of the Round Table” (62).
Incidences like the death of a classmate remind you of your own insignificance—they remind you that the story of the world is not the story of you. They force you to step out of your own mind and think about the world around you. I, just like Gawain, just like every other person, am only a minor, nearly non-existent part of the world. That truth, at least in part, is what I believe we can learn from medieval literature.
“It was customary for the ancients, in the books which they wrote (Priscian testifies to this), to express themselves very obscurely so that those in later generations, who had to learn from them, could provide a gloss for the text and put the finishing touches to their meaning.” (The Lais of Marie de France Prologue)
I originally had a hard time choosing a piece of art from the exhibit we looked at as a class. I felt myself wanting to pick something from the permeant collection, but as I thought about it more, picking something from the permanent collection would have been another instance of me choosing familiarity and dismissing the unknown.
Of all the literature that we’ve read this term, none of the stories have been completely original works of the author or poet. The literature reused characters and plot lines, and the poets have added something somewhat hidden to create their own art within the stories. In class, we talked about the task the poet is faced with when creating one of these stories: they have to stick to conventions of these stories by maintaining the known outcome, but they must also find ways to say something more than just what is in the plot. Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes take preexisting stories and leave hidden marks or add aspects surrounding the plot. When thinking about the readings this way, it is easy to see the connection with Invisible Citings. The exhibit grapples with questions of invisibility: does art have a purpose if it has no audience? Must the current audience understand the art?
A staple of the exhibit is the molded cardboard boxes filled with thousands of pages of transcribed works in invisible ink. The audience has no idea if all of the pages in fact hold transcriptions, or even if there are pages in each box. There is something interesting about these invisible transcriptions. Just like medieval literature, it is so easy to see nothing in Invisible Citings except for an odd recreation of another person's art. It is so easy to look at the exhibit at a pedantic attempt at being profound and to overlook its nuances. And that is exactly what connects Invisible Citings and our readings, the fact that all of the nuances and additions of the artists can so easily go completely overlooked. The Lais of Marie de France can exist as both simple love stories and as a more profound depiction of humanity and society. She creates her Lais with the long-term goal of creating something profound, but she knows that her work will first be heard by a king looking to read about knights and courtly love. In reading her prologue, it is clear that she wants to create a unique, long lasting piece of art, but her current opportunities do not allow for that. Invisible Citings allowed me to see and understand the idea of creating art without a necessity for it to be understood at the moment.
While the bulk of your paper will be devoted to the purpose and explanation, you may wish to also address what this might mean for what schools look like or how they function. In short, how would schools accomplish this purpose? This second part is not required.