Speculative Phantasms in Three English Chronicles of the 12Th and 13Th Centuries

Spectral Enmeshments: Speculative Phantasms in Three English Chronicles of the 12th and 13th Centuries

by Emily Russell

B.A. in English Literature, May 2004, William Tyndale College M.A. in English Literature, May 2009, Eastern Michigan University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2018

Dissertation directed by

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Emily Russell has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of May 9, 2018. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Spectral Enmeshments: Speculative Phantasms in Three English Chronicles of the 12th and 13th Centuries

Emily Russell

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Holly Dugan, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

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Dedication

To my favorite animals: Julie, Don, Laura, Maddy.

Acknowledgements

It is common practice to begin a project like this with an acknowledgement that recognizes the vast community of others without whom this text certainly would not have been written. That is no less true in my case, though I do feel particularly fortunate to have among that group some of the most creative, innovative, and supportive people I have ever met. To those on my committee, your work and the ideas you have shared during our conversations have not only inspired me; they have been transformative.

Because of your generosity with both your time and your knowledge, as well as your willingness to show me the vulnerability necessary for meaningful creation, I find that my perspective on what it means to be an engaged scholar greatly altered. Jeffrey, I am grateful for your generosity and your deep investment in fostering risk, possibility, attachment, and beauty in scholarly work. You have shown me what it looks like to be unashamedly human, even and especially when that leaves one vulnerable, avoiding the seeming safety of the status quo. Holly, your encouragement and insights have allowed me to push through this project when ideas seemed to stop coming and when I felt I might not be able to finish this dissertation. Your advice has been practical and compassionate. I have learned a great deal about teaching from you, and especially how to gracefully allow students to come to recognize their own preconceptions. I have watched you empower both graduate and undergraduate students as you have also empowered me to do own my work, take it seriously, and stand behind my ideas.

Jonathan, I remember a particular interaction we had several years ago as I worked on the prospectus for this project. I was trying to figure out how to construct and justify my primary source archive. You sat with me for an entire hour discussing how I used the

v term history in my explanation. You could see I was using a stunted definition of the term and you were unwilling to let me take the easy road and remain ambiguous in my usage.

Time and again throughout this project, you have helped me take abstract ideas and ground them in an archive, insisting on both ingenuity and precision. Those conversations have helped me develop as a thinker. You have taught me the importance of specifics, even in the speculative. I want to thank each of you for giving me the gifts of your time, energy, creativity, and support. These are costly gifts to give someone and your largess has been vast—even wondrous.

My family and friends have also been instrumental in the creation and completion of this project—it belongs to them as much as it belongs to me. Don, you are an amazing editor and an even more amazing partner. Thank you for meticulously going through my chapters, even when I stared nervously over your shoulder as you marked errors and made marginal comments. Thank you for not complaining when I couldn’t make plans over so many weekends and for dragging me out into the world when I began to get a little too attached to my computer and books. Thank you especially for keeping things in perspective. Jennifer Linhart Wood, you are an angel. I cannot begin to list all the things you did for me throughout this process. You made what seemed like an impossible task possible. You sent encouraging messages at just the right times. You let me vent about the process, but you never let me stop there, pushing me to keep going and conquer the next challenge.

Abstract of Dissertation

Spectral Enmeshments: Speculative Phantasms in Three English Chronicles of the 12th and 13th Centuries

The stories in this project, and the story of this project, are intimately invested in creating and exploring spectral enmeshments that are poly-chronic, wonder-oriented and always more than human. The narratives I work with—found in the writings of Walter

Map, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Tilbury—include apparitional figures, objects and spaces that reorient our relationships with the natural and fantastical enmeshments we inhabit. To varying degrees, each of these authors celebrate the ambiguous nature of the tales they tell. They often seem to relish the sense of wonder these stories about phantom islands and lovers back from the dead evoke in reader and writer alike. Real and imagined, living and dead, present and past merge in these tales that blur categorical lines. The affective and phenomenological experiences of wonder, enchantment, and horror that come with dwelling in these spaces of ambiguity allow us to perceive and practice a more enmeshed way of thinking about our human and nonhuman relationships, as well as our various relationships with modes of knowledge-making and storytelling.

More than metaphors for anthropocentric experience, the specters I seek to evoke are sites of metamorphosis. By exploring the ways these spectral encounters create and hold open spaces for thinking enmeshments in more network-oriented ways, I work toward a more inclusive, more intimate and effusive, trans-substantial mode of engaging with social-political-material-narrative knowledge ecologies.

The project revolves around a theory of spectral intimacy, or transformative affective and phenomenological enmeshment. It is very much informed by work of

vii object-oriented ontology and speculative realist theorists, especially those who think in terms of enmeshment. The project is divided into three chapters. The first is about spectral embodiment, the second is about spectral relationality, and the third is about environmental spectrality.

My primary texts are Walter Map's Courtiers’ Trifles (De Nugis Curialium),

Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland (Topographia Hibernica) and Journey through

Wales (Itineraruim Cambriae), and Gervase of Tilbury's Recreation for an Emperor

(Otia Imperialia). I am drawn to these three texts primarily because they are each collections of stories that are influenced by several different traditions—vernacular, romance, exemplar, travel narrative, and others. Each is a multi-genric enmeshment, offering proliferations of story encounters. Several of the tales I explore appear in more than one of these texts, offering me the opportunity to track the tale through diverse narrative networks.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract of Dissertation ...... vii

Introduction: Encountering the Spectral ...... 1

Chapter 1: Spectral Bodies...... 35

Chapter 2: Spectral Intimacies ...... 68

Chapter 3: Spectral Ecologies ...... 119

Bibliography ...... 175

Introduction: Encountering the Spectral

Many assert that they have often seen the band: but recently, it is said, in the first year of the coronation of our King Henry, it ceased to visit our land in force as before. In that year it was seen by many Welshmen to plunge into the Wye, the river of Hereford. From that hour the phantom journeying has ceased, as if they had transmitted their wanderings to us, and betaken themselves to repose. Yet if you are not willing to note how lamentable this unrest may be, not only in our own Court, but in almost all those of great princes, you will have to enjoin silence on me: I shall be quite satisfied, and it will assuredly be fairer. Will you listen for a brief space to an account of certain recent events? Walter Map, Courtiers’ Trifles, first distinction

What are we to make of these stories of the dead and the undead, of ghosts and spectral being, and of magical thinking and uncanny events? Can these grave beliefs be written off as the products of unstable minds in highly stressful environments? Tim Cook, “Grave Beliefs: Stories of the Supernatural and the Uncanny among Canada’s Great War Trench Soldiers”

Looking to the sky—a speculative battle cry

In late August of 1914, British soldiers retreated from the Mons-Condé Canal with Germans in pursuit. As they fled, they looked to the cloudy sky and saw a host of what some would later describe as angels, others as ghostly longbowmen, specters from the Battle of Agincourt which had taken place nearly 500 years earlier. The men on the ground watched as these ephemeral fighters in the sky held off the German attackers, allowing the highly outnumbered British forces to withstand a two-day confrontation.

There were many casualties on each side, but it was a fortifying event for the British who had expected it to go much worse. In the days and years after the Battle of Mons, many soldiers and civilians stood by their explanation of what had happened that night, claiming they were saved by an otherworldly army. Their stories have been passed down, reinterpreted, retold. Often referred to as the Angels of Mons, these are not the only

1 phantom warriors known to intercede in battle.1 History is filled with stories of strange allies appearing and disappearing in moments of crisis. Did these soldiers simply read in the clouds the shapes they needed to see to find the courage to continue fighting? Or did they receive otherworldly aid? There is a tradition in western culture of explaining away stories about spectral encounters: they are the result of extreme psychical stress, hallucinations, shared delusions, misinterpretations of logical and mundane occurrences.

Tim Cook is quick to point out, however, that these types of interpretations too often result in silencing voices deemed unable to describe and make adequate sense of their own realities, dismissing the physical and psychological complexities of life lived on the front line. He asks, “Can we, as historians, accept the words of soldiers to provide context to the experience of war—as we all do in writing about any aspect of the soldiering experience on the Western Front—but disregard other experiences that perhaps do not fit as easily into our constructed perception of these soldiers” (541)? What material role these cloud warriors play in any hostile encounter is debatable, but their impact is real, felt, lived.

Cook, a war historian particularly interested in the psychological aspects of life on the front lines, argues that spectral encounters are a common but vastly overlooked part of everyday life for those who live on the border between life and death. Using diaries and letters, focusing especially on those written during the First World War, he has amassed an archive that proves wartime ghostly visitations should not easily be dismissed. They play a significant role in the experiences of many soldiers. Cook’s work marks a change in perspective about which aspects of front line life are worth scholarly attention. He expresses an interest in suspending discussions about veracity and belief,

2 withholding judgement and resisting the urge to dismiss spectral sightings and otherworldly experiences reported by soldiers as the results of sleep deprivation and extreme stress. He acknowledges that these can be factors, but he argues that to read these accounts with the foregone conclusion that these soldiers must be hallucinating or confused is to dismiss wholesale what many experience as very real and often transformative life events.

Perhaps it misses the point to try too rigorously to define the nature of this type of event. For some, the warriors in the sky in August of 1914 were a mass hallucination, and for others they were spectral ancestors, or angels. They can be all these things, and something else too. For the British soldiers that night, they were allies and that is how they recount them in their memoirs, around their dinner tables, at the gravesides of lost companions. While Cook’s archive is different in many ways from the medieval texts I’ll explore in this project, his approach to his source material echoes my own. Cook chooses to approach stories that might otherwise be met with incredulity with an intentional open- mindedness. In so doing, he shows a concern in his writing for the editorial silencing many historians enact—intentionally or not—in their treatment of source materials that complicate narrative expectations about lived experience.2 Cook collects stories to build an archive that challenges prevailing concepts about what aspects of military life are valid topics of historical documentation and scholarly consideration. I too am invested in narrative encounters that invite an opening up rather than shutting down of interpretive and affective possibilities. This willingness to maintain multiple perspectives echoes an approach to history-making we see in chronicles of the late Middle Ages. The medieval chroniclers whose works I engage with in the following chapters demonstrate a similar

3 interest in challenging dominant perspectives about what types of narratives can exist alongside one another.

One such tale is particularly sonorous in both subject matter and approach. It belongs to the tradition of the Wild Hunt, sometimes referred to as Hellequin’s hunt or the Herlethingi.3 The version found in Courtiers’ Trifles, a twelfth-century chronicle by

Walter Map, is one of the few that attempts to anchor the tale in an historical and political context (Schmitt 11).4 It begins as Herla, a king of the Britons, while on a walk one day long ago, is met by another king unknown to him—a pygmy king, or pygmy-like. Like, too, a monkey. This interceding king is both human-like, but not quite so, and animal- like, though not an animal. He carries with him an air of mythos because he is also Pan- like. It is difficult to identify the nature of this strange king.5 The narrator does not call him a fairy, though he is certainly otherworldly. Jean-Claude Schmitt sees in the description of the visitor indications that he resides in the world of the dead, though even this reading seems to shortchange this complex character (112). One may speculate, but ultimately his origins and his nature remain indeterminate. He is a hybrid, a conglomeration not only in form, but in narrative tradition as well.6 Perhaps it is his almost-but-not-quite-ness that makes him so panoramic, so all-encompassing. This sovereign is strange, and as we will see, he has the ability to make others strange as well.

The brief verbal exchange between the two kings quickly reveals that this strange king is powerful. So powerful, in fact, that he assures the king of the Britons that his human mind cannot fathom the potency of this phantasmic potentate. He hints at a reality that is not infinite but something even more unsettling; his world, his power, is vastly finite. This incomprehensible finitude is a characteristic of what Timothy Morton calls

4 the meshwork. He describes enmeshment as “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things” (The Ecological Thought 28). The meshwork is about connectedness, an intense, often uncomfortable connectedness within which we are all inextricably implicated—located and dislocated at the same time. Our entanglements do not allow for the possibility of extrication, but they also do not allow for individuation and localization

(27-28). Like the strange king who appears to Herla, the meshwork is immeasurably finite (20-58). Morton assures us that thinking about being as enmeshment requires us to live with a sense of strangeness and alienation, but it also requires us to engage in a relationality that is startlingly intimate. He asks us to imagine an interconnectedness that is “not embodied but displaced, spaced, outer spaced” (28). One might wonder how Herla felt when confronted with a being that seems to somehow encompass the nearly uncontainable.7 Did he feel like an alien in his own land? The narrator tells us that after this strange encounter, Herla went home, “struck with wonder” (27). He had been given a glimpse of something he could not understand, a wealth and a kingdom that is so nearly infinite it is rendered incomprehensible. The strange king had knowledge to match; his knowing reached into the past and the future. He predicted Herla’s wedding before Herla himself knew of the event.

The vastness of the strange king’s presence prompts a sense of dislocatedness, but he also approaches Herla with a tone of intimate familiarity. Out of his nearly boundless kingdom within which Herla may or may not exist—like his wealth, his subjects are innumerable, leaving open the possibility that Herla too may be a subject, though he is unaware of it if this is the case—the strange king chooses Herla, noting a pre-existing proximity the two share in relative social status and lineage. For these reasons, he invites

5 himself to Herla’s impending nuptials. This is surprising to Herla not only because invitations are usually proffered by the host and not the guest, but because, as I mention above, Herla does not yet know that he will be married. This is the first part of the agreement. The second requires a reciprocal invitation. Herla will attend the wedding of his new acquaintance. He will be summoned and brought forth at the appropriate time.

When the time for Herla’s royal marriage arrives, so too does the strange king. He brings with him a nearly endless bounty. The sovereign guest appears with a host of similar beings who occupy pavilions they have supplied for themselves, presumably so as not to burden Herla with their immense numbers. They supply their own bounty and share it among the other wedding guests: “Out of these pavilions darted servants bearing vessels each made of a single precious stone, by some not imitable art, and filled the palaces and the tents with plates of gold and jewels; no food or drink was served in silver or wood. Wherever they were wanted, they were at hand: nothing that they brought was from the royal stock or elsewhere; they lavished their own provisions throughout” (27).

The scene is one of unimaginable opulence where the wishes of the wedding party are met before they can scarcely be wanted. No human king could offer as much, and perhaps Herla should have wondered what he might be asked to give in return, but he did not. He enjoyed the excessive prosperity without question. It seems, however, that his guest already had an eye to the future, anticipating the day of his own nuptials. It is apparent throughout the tale that the strange king is interested in contracts. He engages

Herla in a contract the first time they meet. He chooses contractual ceremonies— marriages—as the spaces in which the commitment between the two kings will pay out.

As he prepares to leave Herla’s wedding celebration, he reminds his host of his reciprocal

6 duty: “Noble King, I take God to witness that I am here present at your wedding in accordance with our agreement. Yet if there be anything more of your contract than you see here that you can prescribe to me, I will gladly supply it to the last point; if there be nothing, see that you do not put off the repayment of the honour conferred on you when I shall require it.” After saying this, he does not wait for a response but departs quickly

(29).

His generosity, as boundless as it seems, is actually all about binding; it is about relationship—a very specific and exacting type of relationship. It is about obligation, points of a contract, repayment. The strange king enters into the contract because he sees a type of equality between himself and Herla. He first establishes his own imminence as,

“the king over many kings and princes, an unnumbered and innumerable people” (27).

This vast kingdom, nearly uncontainable in its extent, has sent their king, who “might be described in the same terms as Pan,” to be their “willing messenger” (27). King Herla, his visitor explains, is “closely connected with me in place and descent,” which makes Herla worthy of the king’s presence at his wedding and of the invitation to the strange king’s own nuptial celebration. At least this is what he says to explain his interest. However, both times he speaks of a contract between himself and Herla, he does not allow Herla to respond. This similarity in “place and descent” apparently does not entitle King Herla to an opportunity to refuse or pronounce his own terms in the agreement. Instead, this Pan- pigmy monarch over innumerable subjects creates between them a kind of involuntary reciprocity. It is an entanglement with repercussions for both parties.

For Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Tilbury, the authors of the primary sources I include in this project, collecting stories offered them a way to

7 challenge cultural norms while remaining—for the most part—on politically safe ground in a rather uncertain political situation. The chronicles they produce incorporate stories about spectral encounters in ways that use these tales as sites of possibility, not as deviances that must quickly be reinterpreted and reincorporated into dominant ontological and epistemological narratives.8 The result is that the reader is made to inhabit different perspectives, making possible a reconsideration—even a recasting—of causal relationships.

In the stories of spectral encounters that follow, we are beckoned to look to the skies for cloudy allies, to consider our unknowable relations, panoramic in scope. In short, we are moved to speculate. Not only that, we are given the opportunity to dwell in speculative places—actively, insistently—making space for potentialities. This place— this mode of engagement—does not always bring hope, like it did for the British soldiers.

It can also bring destruction and defeat, like it did for the Germans who found not allies, but conquerors in the clouds. Whatever it brings, these engagements are always political, always transformative, and always transgressive.

***

The archive: chronicling the phantom, fantasizing the chronicle

Like a last will and testament, what we have written down in black ink is only of importance when we ourselves no longer exist. Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales

Recent work on medievalism has undertaken to make nostalgia a subtle and complex instrument of historical and cultural analysis—rather than the punitive bludgeon that it has been—by demonstrating its complexities and not shying away from paradox or conceptual incoherence. Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?

Names and scribblings on fly-leaves, which to one student suggest nothing, may combine in the memory of another into a coherent piece of history, and show him the home of the book at a particular date, and by consequence unveil a whole section of the story of its wanderings. M.R. James, The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

Skin on skin, oily exchange. Soothing? Invigorating? Careful movements, displacements, separations that disturb a dusty covering. For those whose work takes them into the domain of old books, scholarly contact is tinged with sensual intimacies— felt presences—that remind us our sources are always inhabited spaces. There are always partners—presences—in the pages. When you interact with a medieval manuscript, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Bindings are fragile and so movements must be careful, intentional, slow. Vellum can dry out and tear. It must be protected. But most interestingly, it must be handled. Human fingertips add oil to old skin and so handling hydrates and preserves. Touch, then, is vital to preservation and, as M.R. James’s observation above makes clear, it works in more than one way. In his account, fingers make contact with page, allowing story to connect with story via the memory of a student. All of these participants, and unseen others, make a history from the encounter.

In The Wanderings and Homes of Medieval Manuscripts, a rather short meditation on how medieval manuscripts come to be found in private collections and in forgotten corners of libraries, M.R. James considers the life of a few manuscripts—their movements and their resting places. He describes the process of reaching for a book on a high shelf in a library, flipping through the pages, feeling its heft in his hands. And then he briefly recounts its history—always a history of owners, inheritors, buyers and sellers.

But, as the title of this little treatise suggests, these histories are not entirely human. There are gaps in the records, periods of manuscript wandering. “Wandering”—the word

9 occasions a pause. Is he proposing that these things have agency? That skin-ink-wood can wander? The suggestion shouldn’t be easily dismissed, especially when one considers the source. It issues from the pen of the man who many call the father of the modern ghost narrative. In his tales, James recognizes the presences he may have felt while wandering through old libraries in search of nearly-lost books. His descriptions in both his scholarly and fictional writings are transportive. In The Wanderings and Homes of Medieval

Manuscripts, he narrates his movements through dusty stacks in a way similar to how he would narrate the movements of one of his haunted protagonists, spying an object that lures him to itself: “Somewhat higher up stands a very stout book,” he writes, “bound in old patterned paper. The material of it is paper too, the language is Greek …” (8). Later, he provides a brief history of another volume and meditates on the illusiveness of his task. The history of this text-object recedes from him: “we know the beginning and the end of the book’s wanderings, but not the middle of the story” (9). Manuscripts are hard to follow; they often have shadowy pasts, disappearing for years only to resurface in unexpected places, beckoning again and seeking out contact. Manuscripts move— sometimes in human hands, but sometimes in fire and flood. Insects and rodents are notorious page-consumers. Air and dust, incorrigible touchers, handle leather more often than any human hand. When narrating manuscript histories, one must include a myriad of wanderings and wanderers. It is simply impossible to do otherwise.

I first encountered M.R. James as he inhabited not the role of a ghost tale-teller or manuscript hunter, but of a translator. In 1923, he released his translation of Walter

Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles, a twelfth century collection of tales. Map’s is exactly the type of conglomerate text I am drawn to, a bit odd and out of sorts. It is the type of thing that

10 seems to be composed of ceaseless movements. It is transportive. One cannot help but imagine the alterations, accumulations and losses a text like this undergoes through the process of linguistic translation, as one more dimension of movements is added to the shifting structure. I wanted to know who it was that sat with this thing so long and did the labor of birthing it into modern English. The more I learned about him, the more James seemed the fitting translator. Carolyn Dinshaw posits that even in his fictional— phantasmal—works, James was a translator. She argues that his ghost stories are a form of translation, mediating between his scholarly contacts with texts and his more affective relationships with his work. She offers a tempting interpretation, especially since so many of James’s protagonists are scholars and so many of his haunted/haunting encounters involve old things—manuscripts and other objects. Dinshaw writes that, in James’s ghost stories, “[he] reflects deeply and critically on his own professional preoccupations as manuscript scholar, philologist, archeologist” and that his stories are “indicative of

James’s complex engagement with the medieval” (How Soon Is Now? 96).

Ultimately, Dinshaw reads these ghost stories as stories of loss and fear— warnings to those who come too closely into contact with the past, who are too oriented toward a temporality that is not their own. Read as such, James’s stories become something like an exorcism for the over-invested medievalist:

These stories suggest that loss is not only inevitable but also must be accepted, that curiosity about or desire for the past can be dangerous: such curiosity and desire can not only threaten the stability of your affective and historical self- understanding and positioning but can in fact kill you. Ancient artifacts present a puzzle or abet a mystery that the antiquarian is driven to solve, but they also unleash a fury of malevolence and violence. (99).

While Dinshaw’s interpretation of James’s phantasmal stories reads like a warning, her prevailing interest in impassioned scholarly engagements throughout How

Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time should make one question her take on James’s tales. Loss is not always a bad thing, or at least it is not always an experience that should be avoided. Danger too should sometimes be embraced. What Dinshaw ultimately finds in James’s ghost stories is an affective enactment of what she calls the “ghostly causation” of working with a medieval archive

(99). Causes become jumbled as chronologies are complicated. To live with medieval stories requires one to develop a queer sense of time. The archive is haunted and those who engage with it will find themselves sharing space with phantoms.

James’s observations about manuscript agency are not confined to his scholarly works. They often appear in his stories about specters and hauntings. One such tale begins thusly: A Cambridge man sits in the cathedral of a decaying French village—he fills a notebook and snaps a few pictures of the ancient scene as a nervous church guardian attends him a little too closely. The scholar, distracted by the warden’s anxious hovering, asks to be left alone in the building—a request the old man receives with a shiver: “Leave monsieur alone in the church? No, no.” And so the scene goes—the

Cambridge man, Dennistoun, works in his notebook and the guardian of the ancient cathedral keeps a jumpy watch, swiftly responding to unseen noisemakers and glancing about for unwelcome interlopers. His nerve-wracking task continues until the sun begins to set. Scholar and warden leave the cathedral, its sounds and shadows, and they begin to talk. “If you are the type that is interested in old books, I have something to show you,” prompts the old man. He knows his audience. Dennistoun dreams of long buried manuscripts, the kind that can make a Cambridge man’s career. When the warden produces an old and rather large folio, the scholar is elated. Professional fingers flip

12 through aged pages until they come across an unexpected sight—a drawing, a frightening figure. The folio proves to be a haunted object. Like its past possessors, the manuscript’s new owner becomes the teller of its horrific tale. Once opened, its secret manifests—a hairy hand, moving talons, spider-like. A dark being lurks, scowls, threatens, lurches.

Dennistoun snatches at a crucifix, screams, swoons, and is saved by two servants who know nothing of his demon encounter. When he shares his story, it is with a colleague- narrator. Together, they quote Bible verses about demon-things, night monsters— warnings against unwelcomed encounters.

An unexpected confrontation awaited M.R. James’s Cambridge man in the pages of a Canon’s medieval scrap-book (Nineteen Ghost Stories of M.R. James to Keep You

Up at Night). James, like his character Dennistoun, was a lover of old books. China

Miéville argues that James’s haunting stories are not typical in their engagement with the startling strangeness of haptic manifestation (“M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire:

Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” esp. 119-123). Perhaps attention to touch, manifested as the hairy spider-hand of “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” is due to

James’s other identity as medieval scholar. His work brought him into contact with old folios like the ones he often featured in his stories. He was acquainted with their textures, their weights, their smells. For a cataloguer of the antique, history does not exist in the abstract. Not tokens of bygone days, there is life in these old things.

The ghostly encounters in James’s stories are often preempted by feelings of uneasiness and foreboding. Discomfort crept over Dennistoun just before his first private encounter with the scrap-book. It is a common trope in modern haunted tales—an unshakable feeling of presence in the absence of any sensible companions—the essence

13 of haunting, hauntology. Jacques Derrida explains that hauntology is an untimeliness of the present, a being “out of joint.” It is an always unsettled kind of being where

“[e]verything begins before it begins”—a disruptive absence engendered at the moment of belated conception (Specters of Marx 161). This is the way in which we often approach the modern haunted tale, with the expectation that the ghost will signify the unsignifiable—a trauma perhaps, an historic atrocity or social/material disjunction. Here,

Derrida echoes Dinshaw, or, rather, Dinshaw echoes Derrida, though perhaps one should be a bit wary of narratives of knowledge-making that insist on strictly linear chronologies.

Ultimately, genres—like any form of classification—are unstable things. In this case, I am retroactively applying the signifier chronicle to texts whose authors did not identify them as such. Walter Map describes his goals in writing Courtiers’ Trifles: “My own purpose in the matter is to invent nothing new, and introduce nothing untrue, but to narrate as well as I can what, having seen, I know, or what, having heard, I believe” (37).

He also expresses an interest in providing entertainment and moral lessons through the tales he gathers together in his text. Gerald of Wales, in his introduction to the

Topography of Ireland, notes that he intends to catalogue the nature of both the people and land of Ireland (23-27). By the time he pens his Journey Through Wales, however, his motives seem to have shifted; here, he expresses a desire to write something that will ensure others will remember his work hundreds of years after his death (67).9 This desire seems to infuse his writing with a dual interest—to describe places, especially through the contexts of their past, and to make the reader feel his present circumstances as a member of an often tumultuous court, as a jilted contender for ecclesiastic office, and as

14 someone with heritage that continually places him in politically marginalized spaces.

Gervase of Tilbury, the author of Recreation for an Emperor, the third work I consider in this project, is quite specific about his own authorial intentions. He writes to “present the marvels of every province to our discerning listener, in order that His Imperial Highness may have a source of refreshment for his thoughts …” (559). None of these three authors use the term “chronicle” to describe their own work, but their statements of purpose all demonstrate an interest in collecting tales from various times, sources, and narrative traditions. Each seems to be invested in making connections between past and present events, demonstrating an interest in exploring through narrative how histories shape present circumstances, as well as how current ideologies impress themselves upon the past.

Carolyn Dinshaw, describing Courtiers’ Trifles, writes that the author Walter Map

“is especially concerned to express the temporal ‘jumble’ that is the present—our now

(modernitas) that, he sees, will eventually be someone else’s authoritative past

(auctoritas), our past which was someone else’s modernitas” (60, italics in original).

What she describes is characteristic of the texts I consider in this project, and it is a feature that persuades me to apply the term “chronicle” to each of the three works I mention above. These texts are interested in time and order—chronos—but in ways that complicate linear modes of temporal engagement. These are not histories, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. They do not seem to be invested in using narratives to create a sense of social heritage or location. Rather, they often mobilize story to dislocate, challenging regimes of knowledge-making that use historical narratives to underwrite systems of power that can be mobilized to justify devaluing peoples, places, events, and

15 even modes of being. The “Tale of King Herla” provides an exemplary illustration of these concurrent preoccupations. As such, it also functions as a microcosm of the chronicle genre.

The Medieval Chronicle Society’s “Notes to contributors” on their journal site points out some of the ambiguities inherent in this genre designation. For instance, one of the major questions with which a contributor to the journal may choose to engage is whether chronicles should be considered historical texts or literary texts. When posed in this way, the question invites a contrary response—why can’t they be both? And that is part of the point. Chronicles cross boundary lines and trouble expectations. The textual equivalent of wonder cabinets, chronicles are hybrids. They are the creations of curator- authors, story compilers. As Malasree Home points out in “Making the Chronicle: form, genre, identity,” compilers of this type were much respected in the later Middle Ages

(102-103). While Home notes that some chronicles were interested in constructing a chronology—a more linear framing of history—others belong to a tradition of what

Home calls “weaver-compilers” (126). For these authors, “the act of authorship is intrinsically linked to the functions of compilation, collation and reordering of a range of sources to create a new text out of the old” (126). It is decidedly to this weaver tradition that Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of Tilbury belong. Each utilized many different sources, not all of which are traceable today. Undoubtedly, some of these sources belong to oral tradition, a fact that seems particularly important when considering the works of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales and the afterlives of their stories in the manuscript medium.

The chronicle as a type of historical genre invites the reader to occupy a position toward history that complicates strict distinctions between past and present.10 This is a theme that runs through each chapter of this project, not only because chronicles require the reader to engage with pasts that are also made present within the world of the narrative, but because the very nature of the work of medievalists encourages this multi- temporal type of textual interaction. This is exactly the type of asynchrony Carolyn

Dinshaw refers to when considering how M.R. James’s attachments to the materials he encountered as a scholar of medieval texts expressed themselves in his ghost stories.11 He finds in these spectral tales a space to speculate about reader-writer-text relationships of allure and desire, obsession and anxiety. I find myself particularly drawn to medieval chronicles because they compile modes of temporal engagements, and at the same time beckon me to enter into narrative enmeshments that challenge what Dinshaw calls

“modernist temporal regimes [which are] based on a boundary between past and present, which in turn supports the boundary between subject and object, inside and outside” (37).

As Dinshaw makes clear, any speculative project that desires to blur boundaries between humans and nonhuman others must necessarily engage with asynchronous narrative and story networks. Tales and genre traditions touch and mingle, informing one another, but as Timothy Ingold argues, the act of storying is the stuff of vitality; it is the foundational functional move of living in the meshwork.12

In academic arenas, speculation is too often an activity of skepticism, of shutting down possibilities. Clear interpretations are prized over open-ended wondering. Scholars look to plant their feet firmly in one field, but in so doing, much is often repressed and even dismissed. This is a problem Avery Gordon acknowledges in the introduction to her

17 seminal work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. She found that time and again her interests led her into the no-man’s land of interdisciplinarity. She struggled for a language that could accommodate various modes of knowledge production while at the same time remaining legible to those whose work required them to inhabit disparate fields of study. She found too that even those willing to embrace interdisciplinarity were often loath to mix their academic and personal selves, leaving a gap, an intimate void, between scholarship and lived experience.

Gordon’s frustrations are echoed not only by other scholars who have come up against similar border walls, but by people in all walks of life who have had encounters that do not easily fit into dominant knowledge-making discourses. Many of the soldiers present at Mons for that spectral encounter later wrote about it without doubt, but with a degree of embarrassment, knowing that their testimonies were transgressive or easily dismissible because they break with dominant social beliefs about the supernatural. And still they shared their experiences, their perspectives and speculations, even when doing so left them vulnerable to accusations of incredulity. Speculation happens in places of crisis; this is why it is often so closely aligned with skepticism, a defensive type of speculative engagement. Speculating about the spectral—about ghosts, but also about the place and nature of the human in a vastness that seems always to both shrink and expand requires one to occupy a space of crisis. It requires vulnerability and sometimes a willingness to look to the sky, squint your eyes, summon courage, and encounter the specter. Can you hear their battle cry?

***

A spectral invitation

A vocabulary and practice were missing while demanding their due. Haunted and, I admit, sometimes desperate, sociology certainly—but also the human sciences at large—seemed to provide few tools for understanding how social institutions and people are haunted, for capturing enchantment in a disenchanted world. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Avery Gordon begins Ghostly Matters in a rather unique way. Like many scholars who work with ghost stories and with how hauntings function in pop culture, she acknowledges that these ideologically troubling occurrences often utilize an established narrative language of the supernatural to articulate and critique political traumas that are otherwise inexpressible. Unlike many scholars, she also shares a personal and unsettling ghostly experience, and in so doing, she effectively breaches boundaries between her academic identity and her identity as a participant in a paranormal encounter, as well as the borders between fact and fiction. She explains:

I came to write about ghostly matters not because I was interested in the occult or in parapsychology, but because ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish. Call it grounded theory: in one field another emerged to literally capture my attention and become the field work. The persistent and troubling ghosts in the house highlighted the limitations of many of our modes of inquiry and the assumptions they make about the social world, the people who inhabit these worlds, and what is required to study them. (8).

Gordon’s description of what brought her to her subject matter is intentionally duplicitous. She makes use of metaphor in a way that leaves the reader questioning to what extent “ghosts in the house” are those experiences that cannot be communicated via traditional sociological narrative and to what extent they are dwellers in a literal haunted house. Gordon and her work are haunted, to be sure, but by what manner of spirit? This is a case in which the question is more productive than the answer—if there were to be an

19 answer. Throughout Ghostly Matters, she is invested in troubling the extent to which metaphor intercedes in the real, and her mode of introduction models this investment.

In what follows, I intend to offer readings that upset traditional approaches to spectral stories. While my primary archive consists of medieval texts, the reader should not assume that spectral encounters were automatically met with less skepticism because of their temporal context. Instead, the authors of these texts often express a mixture of reactions to phantasmic tales. At times, a reader can imagine a slight incredulous smile spread across the writer’s face as he pens a ghost story. A few sections later, the same writer will write of a phantom who visited a trusted friend, piling detail upon detail to add the weight of evidence to the tale. Common too are the tales that are followed by statements of uncertainty—Is this true? Who can know? At these times, it is as if the stories break free of the writer, thwarting authorial intention. They leave the author in pursuit, guessing at a destination as he attempts to avoid an epistemological crash. Or perhaps peering out through his words looking for that upcoming crash, knowing it is at these places of collision where some of the best stories are born.

The “Tale of King Herla” is steeped in conflict, but it begins with a strong encounter and a wedding invitation. Expectation is thwarted from the beginning as it is not the future bride and groom who extend the invitation, but rather the future guest who insists on his own attendance, setting parameters for his engagement in the event. This transposition of expectation is characteristic of the stories in Courtiers’ Trifles. It is a twisting narrative landscape, full of movement but often lacking direction. This characteristic narrative wanderlust is exemplified in this story. While “The Tale of King

Herla” has ties to the Wild Hunt narrative tradition, it includes unique elements that make

20 clearer the link Map sees between restless phantom riders and unrest in the court culture within which Map finds himself. He ends the tale by relating to his reader that in the year

Henry II took the throne, many Welshmen witnessed Herla’s spectral troop “plunge into the Wye, the river of Hereford. From that hour the phantom journeying has ceased, as if they had transmitted their wanderings to us, and betaken themselves to repose” (31). As a descendant of the Wild Hunt, the “Tale of King Herla” is more directly rooted in a mythological tradition; it is not an account corroborated by eyewitnesses like some of the spectral tales Map includes in his text.13 Rather, it is told in a way that leaves it intentionally straddling the divide between speculative fact and rooted fiction. The point, it seems, is not whether the reader believes the tale, but how far she is willing to follow the troop and adopt their wandering ways.

The relationships in this tale are examples of what Timothy Morton and Tim

Ingold call the mesh or the meshwork. Ingold explains that things are inextricably interwoven in the meshwork; nothing exists outside of it and nothing escapes it. As a result, the act of being is intensely relational, though it is not goal-oriented. It is not purposive or predictable (Being Alive xii, 4-6). Invitation, as well as any other type of contractual exchange, does not require what we might call intent on both or either side.

The strange king does not need to compel consent from Herla because Herla is already implicated in the meshwork of the exchange. Similarity and contact ensured his engagement this before Herla even knew what was being asked of him. While Herla’s spoken consent is never required or attained, he is complicit in the relationship. He does not use words to secure the bond, as the strange king does, but rather allows his actions to speak instead. Upon the date of his own wedding celebration, he does not turn away the

21 strange king, nor does he refuse the copious gifts offered him. When in a year’s time he is summoned to reciprocate, he comes bearing gifts, though not as plentiful as those he received. It seems that within this system of exchange, the gifts one offers are equivalent to the subjects he commands. The Pan-like monarch, ruler over the nearly innumerable, offers gifts that match the vastness of his domain. Herla, in turn, gives generously, but not excessively. He is rich in subjects and gold, but not immeasurably so. This is yet another form of contract; one is obliged to give what one can.

***

Speculative theory

In the language of analysis, ‘facts’ speak of ‘choices’ which are precedents, and which are not even verifiable but, thanks to critical examination, are only ‘falsifiable.’ Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

I rely on the work of storytellers like Tim Ingold, Graham Harman, and Bruno Latour, and I argue that the stories of enmeshment must embrace the spectral and the phantasmal.

They must incorporate the vast spectrums of haunting desires, intimacies, secrets, expectations, betrayals, fantasies, ghosts. Instead of reading phantoms as metaphors for the unsignifiable, always delayed, withdrawing and “out of joint,” I tell the stories of agentive and performative specters, fully engaged in their hauntings.

My interest is in exploring phantasmic enmeshment, a way of living as haunting, as story, and a theory of language necessarily haunts this project. I argue that language is en-corporeal and co-creative, just like any other sensual connection. Story is relationship; relationship is story. Story is also linguistic, moving through, with, as association. I insist on the literalness of the phantasmal and I mean this in two ways. First, the phantom is not a representation of something else. It is what it is. This is not a truth claim but rather an

22 insistence on a fully performative, co-creative, relational reality.14 Second, the stories I tell are literal, of the letter, hauntings. They exist as stories in textual networks. In particular, I am interested in past stories, stories of the past, and how the past as a thing does the work of co-creation within the mesh. Grounding my explorations in literary texts allows me to think about the agentive and sensual aspects of language and narrative.

Language is sensually enmeshed. It is a perceptual and relational thing, no more or less co-creative than any other.

The “Tale of King Herla” is passed down, known, because of the repercussions of his relationship with the strange king. He does not go down in history as a king of the

Britons but rather as the leader of the Herlethingi, a wandering group of warriors closely associated with the tradition of the Wild Hunt (371). Unlike the Angels of Mons, the spectral members of the Wild Hunt do not seem to appear when needed; they are not driven by a desire to help. Rather, their roaming seems as devoid of intent as the strange exchange that initiated it. While mounting his horse to leave the strange king’s celebration, Herla is handed a hound. The hound is one among many gifts given to him and his men as they prepare to depart, but it is unique in its office. It sits on Herla’s lap and Herla is warned that he and his men may not dismount their horses until the hound willingly jumps to the ground. He takes the dog and rides with it back to his own land.

When Herla’s party reemerges from the cave that houses the mansion of the strange king and into the sun, his first inclination is to ask for news from home. He stops a shepherd and inquires about his new queen. The shepherd, however, can barely understand the request because, as the shepherd explains, “[Y]ou are a Briton and I a Saxon” (29-31).

The distinction is not only linguistic. It is not only cultural. It is temporal. Herla has

23 emerged as a legend and a history, a linguistic relic. He has become a specter, as he is soon to find out. Some of the men accompanying Herla are so astonished to hear they have missed so many years they jump from their horses and instantly turn to dust.

Quickly, the remaining men realize the injunction that has been placed upon the party— any man who leaps from his horse before the hound leaves Herla’s lap will disintegrate, ending his days as particles blown in the wind. Those who jump too soon are reinstated in human time—becoming immediately what the passing years would have made them had they lived and died according to their own temporal nature.15 They also become a part of the environment—dust—something with a history that is taken for granted, a movement, a sediment. They are the very stuff of story—environment, dirt, event. This is, as Ingold explains, how humans understand themselves. We move through lived context, storying as we go (8).

Spectral tales, like the “Tale of King Herla,” often arise at points where events and circumstances necessitate perspectival shifts. Context, dust of those human and nonhuman members of enmeshments who have jumped or are in the process of jumping, becomes story. They are often linked with events and circumstances that force shift in perspective—war, political unrest, philosophical unsettlings. They are the hauntings we seek and avoid, need and fear. They offer a dangerous invitation, more perilous because we cannot know what we are invited to become. Once one is haunted, it is a matter of time, of temporal perspectival shift, before one becomes the haunter.

***

Encountering the specter

[A] kind of sympathetic magic is necessary because in the world and between us as analysts and the worlds we encounter to translate into world-making words are

hauntings, ghosts and gaps, seething absences, and muted presences. The political and affective modalities by which we gain access to the facticity of constructed power either reckons with or displaces these ghostly matters and the matter of the ghost, with consequences either way. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

In the “Tale of King Herla,” it is unclear who can be blamed for the plight of

Herla and his men. They are made into spectral wanderers, but the tale seems unconcerned with establishing a logic to explain their situation. It is unclear whether the dog Herla holds has the power to change their situation, and there is certainly no attempt made to explain why Herla finds himself a stranger in his own land, hundreds of years beyond his own time. It seems like a punishment, but there is no indication that Herla has made any transgression. It is not exactly an occurrence of chance—Herla was sought out—but neither does it follow a narrative logic. Avery Gordon explains that the logic of the phantasmal does not always fit with common ideas about purpose and causation (1-

28). It is disruptive, meant to call attention to itself (xvi). The specters I consider in this project all share these characteristics. In one way or another, they call into question the foundational aspects of “rationalist binaries of Eurocentric culture,” especially concerning causal relationships and taxonomical thinking (Hayes 173).16 The “Tale of

King Herla” is a good example of this. Herla and his haunting hoard demonstrate the complexities of spectral categorization. Who or what can be called a specter? What type of name sticks to characters, events, and spaces that shift? Herla did not experience death, nor did the men who ride with him. Instead, their situation is the result of a strange fairy bargain. Presumably, if the dog had jumped from Herla’s lap, he and his men would have been able to reenter a human temporality, living as mortals instead of specters. This, however, is not what happened. The dog never jumps—we never know why—and so the

25 men must continue to ride. Causation is difficult to determine. Did the strange king intend this fate for Herla? Did he cause it? Does the dog have the power to dictate these circumstances? Perhaps the reasoning lays somewhere else entirely—or perhaps this is another case akin to the Angel of Mons and these ponderings miss the point.

When I began this project, I anticipated adhering to a general categorical distinction. I expected to explore only stories that contained proper ghosts. As I delved deeper into my source material, however, I realized that doing so would produce a stunted and misleading picture of medieval ideas concerning spectral beings. Today, the term spectral is most synonymous with ghosts and perhaps demons, but these terms do little to clarify meaning. Is a ghost an agentive imprint of past human emotion? Is it a cognizant soul deprived of body? Is a demon a purely spiritual creature? Is it always malevolent? For the writers of the texts I explore in this project, the matter is even more complex. For them, a specter is part of a vast associative chain including linguistic and traditional links between characters and spaces that do not always seem intuitive to the modern reader. That is not to say the modern reader will not find something of the familiar in these spectral tales. In fact, the modern ghost narrative tradition owes a great deal to these medieval narratives.

There is another reason I developed an aversion to strict categorical cohesion as I engaged with my primary archive. Simply put, spectrality directly challenges adherence to clear-cut definitions. Specters escape the boxes that are meant to encompass them, and this is no less the case with ideological containers. For me, this is one of the more alluring characteristics of spectral beings, though it often leads me into narrative spaces full of definitional friction. These are uncomfortable, unsteadying spaces, but it should

26 not be surprising that a spectral archive provokes a sense of unease. This project dwells in a space of friction between meaning and ambiguity. I argue for a deeply relational ontology and epistemology, so relational that it is ultimately impossible to separate ontological being from epistemological knowing. Yet, in this shifting space there is no room for the throwing up of hands, for declarations of dissociation: “It is all relative!”

Specters haunt; they do not leave well enough alone. They do not allow for the comforts of apathy. While a good ghost narrative cannot subsist on jump scares alone, it is rarely devoid of them. Specters start, startle. In this project, there are ghosts, spirits, and apparitions. There are fairies, demons, and even the odd werewolf. Humans lurk in these narratives too. But the closer these specters creep—the more you, dear reader, feel their touch—the more you will be provoked to speculation. What was it you expected to find here? And what do you think you found instead?

I use the terms “specter” and “spectral” to describe my theoretical framework in large part because our culture shares a general cinematic idea of what specters are like— shifty, translucent, unpredictable, able to appear and disappear. These properties lend images to abstractions, grounding me a bit more in the real, even if it is a highly speculative, haunted real. Medieval specters, however, do not always have these qualities.

Often, they are more solid and behave more like a combination of ghost and zombie, and they often travel within a Christian tradition of demons, purgatorial spirits, and at times, animism. There is an instability built into this project—referents are allowed to move and be transformed by their context.

***

Speculations: embodied, intimate, ecological

We’ll designate mourners and record their grieving, then play it on an endless feedback loop machine that has a one-thousand-year battery. Some call this medieval studies. Or the humanities, which need to get more, and not less human. Eileen Joy, “on OOO”

One needs, in short, to enter the fray without special standing. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life

Much of the current critical work done concerning the types of stories I look at focuses on what they can tell us about repressed social traumas. This approach is often unselfconsciously anthropocentric; it takes for granted that trauma is something belonging to the human experience alone, and only humanity would look for ways to express and/or exorcise scarring events. A nonhuman other may appear in these discourses from time to time, but it does so as mediator, a carrier of someone else’s story.

These nonhuman others materialize in scholarship as a prop in human stories. I believe there is good reason to consider the power of traumatic encounter in these haunting occasions, but to take for granted that trauma is an experience exclusive to humanity is to quarantine humanity in a way that does not elucidate trauma but rather inflicts further traumatic cutting and scarring. In an attempt to give to those without voice a mode of expression and catharsis, worlds are silenced and the very condition of anthropos vitality is warped.

I do not directly deal with differences between the two main camps of thought in this theoretical landscape—one linked most closely with the theories of Bruno Latour and the other with those of Graham Harman. This is in large part because both speculators, and those speculators that build upon their work, share some fundamental ideas that

28 ultimately matter more than the concepts upon which they disagree. They do not represent two sides of a debate, but rather two voices in an ever-emerging conversation.

In fact, Harman sees his work as a “debugging” of Latour’s theories, not a rebuttal

(Prince of Networks).

That said, I do think it is worth acknowledging one difference between the speculations of the two philosophers and explaining my current position on this difference. Philosophy is political and throughout the majority of this project, I am interested in politics that are insistently more than human, but as I do so I find myself time and again realizing how our ideas about how we relate to nonhumans are echoed in our treatment of humans. Perspectives take in vast landscapes. They matter and materialize through actions and relationships. They shape us. For this reason, I find the idea of an ever-receding essence, a fundamental concept for Harman, troubling. I embrace instead a theory of fully performative, fully emergent, fully relational enmeshment, and my reasons are very much grounded in my own perspective concerning the hazards of classist hierarchies within human relationships—and especially labor relationships. My concern has to do with the concept of dignity.

In western thought, dignity is often linked to individualism. If we understand people as individuals who have their own histories, their own concerns, loves, losses, ambitions, and motives, then we will treat them fairly. In this context, the term fairly is vague. It references a standard and for some, this standard implicitly implicates a form of equality between those who set that standard and those who are held to it, but labor relations in this country paint a very different picture. Fairness is too often productively and lucratively abstract and so those who have the power to set standards, when

29 considering those individuals who work for them, calculate fairness not via extension of their own sense of personal fairness for themselves, but through an arithmetic of ownership—one reinforced by the very notion of individualism that is meant to underwrite a politics of care. Individual workers are responsible for themselves and, ultimately, this viewpoint has led to abuses of power. It is these abuses that necessitated the founding of unions to protect workers and they did this not by stressing individuality but by becoming a united entity. Of course, this entity is not unproblematic and it is implicated in its own abuses of power, but the urge to unite recognizes the importance of necessary reliance—of complete connection. It is only when workers become indispensable that they are granted dignity, and individuality is not what makes them necessary. In Harman’s theory of withdrawal, I hear echoes of a devaluing kind of individualism. Harman does not mobilize his theory in this way, but if it is taken within the context of human politics I think one is invited to see these hazardous implications.

This thought provokes in me a hesitation and in truth, I hover within a divided reaction to essence as it is used in object-oriented ontology. Withdrawal is a complex concept and it is not entirely academic of me to so openly apply my own concerns about labor relations to a philosophy that for many who engage with it does not seem to speak to this issue. In so doing, I make my own philosophies vulnerable—and I make myself as a scholar vulnerable by extension. But if we are to celebrate in-betweenness, becomings, transformations, then perhaps vulnerability is necessary. It implies a space of instability and of dependence. If I apply to myself the standard of the philosophical work with which I engage, it seems fair that I allow my own vulnerability to be apparent in my work.

Each of the three chapters of this project explores a mode of being with and as spectral enmeshment. In chapter one, “Spectral Bodies,” I consider embodied enmeshments—those conglomerations that so often work as what Bruno Latour calls a black box, a thing teeming with actants continually striving to hold together but seeming substantial and solid. Deceptively unstable, the performance of embodiment is a story humans are particularly fond of telling themselves. Unbreachable barriers, virgin, solid— we enact this tale through our buildings, our clothing, our language, our medicine. And yet, we cannot escape our spectral nature. We stretch, touch, mingle, transform from instant to instant. New. Again. What is really at stake in our stories about embodiment?

Deeply metaphorical in our nature, our bodies tell stories too.

From embodiment, I move to intimate connectivity in chapter two, “Spectral

Intimacies.” Our intimacies, chosen and otherwise, make us. They are dynamic, unpredictable, vital. I work with Ian Bogost’s ideas about friction and being as transformation alongside speculations about what it means to come into contact with and to be what Timothy Morton calls the strange stranger. Within this speculative mesh, meaning-making happens via contact, but what does it mean to make contact with phantoms and specters? And how do those intimate encounters change us? They shape and unmake, constantly shifting. From within this entangling touching, one might ask: where am I?

In the final chapter, “Spectral Ecologies,” I consider what it means to exist in and as spectral ecology. These ecologies are not always caring, not always safe. Instead, they are spaces of constant flux, of competing struggles and affections. I consider medieval colonial discourse to think about transformative contacts, always multi-directional, trans-

31 temporal, trans-territorial. Typically, colonizing encounters are framed as human-human interactions, but through theories of enmeshment, they become more vast, more encompassing, and even less predictable. Landscapes are alive, agentive, and reaching.

Like the strange king whose offer makes Herla complicit in a pact simply through presence and the extension of an invitation, you, dear stranger, have found yourself in possession of an invitation, implicated even if only by physical contact or phenomenological encounter—eye movements make sense of symbols on a screen or, perhaps, hands touch and turn pages. What you will find in the pages that follow cannot be called gifts; I have no jewels, no golden plates brimming with delicacies to offer.

Instead, I have story. I’ll take part in your story if you will take part in mine. Just as the strange king’s bargain of reciprocity was misleading, you’ll find the one I offer here is equally duplicitous—or multi-plicitious. None of these stories are mine, and yet I serve them up to you. In return, an invitation—stranger to stranger. Follow me through the gaps and see. Be dazzled, as Herla was, by the spectacle of spectral encounters that haunt these pages.

1 See The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians by David Clarke, Wiley (2005). For an interesting study of spectral encounters and premonition events during World War I, see “Grave Beliefs: Stories of the Supernatural and the Uncanny Among Canada’s Great War Trench Soldiers.” Journal of Military History, April 2013, pp. 521-542. 2 In the introduction to Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon posits that some scholars and intellectuals who understand the mechanics of “the world capitalist system and repressive states” choose to enforce binaries they recognize as false to stabilize these systems of power. These binaries—fact and fiction, subject and object—require the silencing of certain personal and historical narratives. Gordon’s interests lead her to investigate human systems of abusive power and how they both use and repress various modes of “knowledge production,” including the censoring of narratives deemed unworthy of attention and dissemination. While my own interests lead me in a different direction, the idea that all modes of knowledge-making have political implications is one I share with Gordon. I argue that these implications reach beyond the domain of human politics alone—and indeed that there is no such thing as a strictly human politics—but Gordon’s observations about the violence carried out on human bodies due to these regimes of silencing aligns with the primary concerns of my current project.

3 See “Hellequin’s Hunt” in Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, by Jean-Claude Schmitt for more about the narrative tradition of the Wild Hunt. 4 As I will explain later in this introduction, chronicles of this period were often invested in rooting marvelous events in specific places and times and identifying historical characters with these events. Perhaps that is why Map chooses to be more particular than many other writers concerning these aspects of the story. 5 Throughout the rest of this introduction, I will refer to the otherworldly king as the “strange king,” implying a connection to what Timothy Morton calls the “strange stranger,” his term for inhabitants of the meshwork (40). 6 James Wade notes that one of the most unsettling characteristics of the strange king in the “Tale of King Herla” is that he does not seem to follow any pattern of logic. If he were strictly a fairy figure, his actions would more closely fit narratively established behaviors for fairy kings. They do not. In fact, Wade sees this character as so deviant, breaking so clearly from narrative tradition, that he suggests Map’s point in including the tale may have been to thwart any attempts at interpreting or making meaning from Herla’s plight (Fairies in Medieval Romance 80-81). 7 I will take up the subject of embodiment in the meshwork in chapter one, “Spectral Bodies.” Here, however, I want to point out the paradox of the strange king. I suggest that he exhibits many characteristics of the meshwork and I am using his encounter with Herla to explore relationship with and within this mode of being. As Morton points out, however, the concept of enmeshment is at odds with how we tend to think of embodiment as a closed system of being. This is far from the only paradox of enmeshed being, and for the most part, I feel it is in keeping with the nature of the meshwork to accept paradoxes without attempting to incorporate them into a unifying system of logic. Incomprehensible finitude can encompass contradictions. 8 In this project, I attempt to distinguish between the terms “narrative” and “story” in the following way: I use “narrative” in the traditional sense of the term, as a tale or account, fictional or otherwise. By the term “narrative network” I mean allusive, associative, and tradition-based connections between narratives. My use of the term “story” is informed by Timothy Ingold’s definition of the term, which is much more concerned with an embodied form of knowledge production. Storying is intimately connected with movement and with living in the mesh. Ingold explains that “to move, to know, and to describe are not separate operations that follow one another in series, but rather parallel facets of the same process—that of life itself” (xii). Story and storying are active, relational, emergent, and conglomerate. Ingold dedicates the entirety of part IV of Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description to developing his complex definition of “story.” I attempt to adhere to these usages of the terms when possible, but I find that the distinctions do not always hold. Narrative relies on storying; perhaps it is something like a congealing of story. And story makes itself knowable—at least to humans—in large part through narrative networks. 9 While these writers did not give to themselves the title of chronicler, some scholars have applied the term to them, though not consistently. See for example Fairies in Medieval Romance, page 66. In a discussion of the links between history writing and romance writing, James Wade identifies Gerald of Wales as a chronicler. 10 The term “chronicle” seems to retain some ambiguity even among scholars of medieval history and romance. James Wade, for example, explains that medieval chronicles “insist on certain specificities to time, place, and persons” (69). The description could easily leave one with a misleading picture of the category to which, according to Wade, writing like those of Gerald of Wales belong. While it is true that Gerald is interested in establishing clear times, places, and historical persons in his texts, his arrangement of such specificities creates something more akin to a palimpsest than a timeline. 11 Within this context, Dinshaw defines asynchrony as “different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now” (5, italics in original).

12 Ingold makes this argument explicit in the preface to Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, page xii, but it a fundamental part of the argument of the entire text. 13 Map mentions that many Welshmen saw the troop ride into the river Wye, but he does not identify particular observers, using instead the language of urban legend—I knew someone who knew someone who saw… Compared to the way Map treats other eyewitness accounts, this reads almost as a dismissal, but like the urban legends of today, he leaves open a space for doubt. Are there Welshmen who saw Herla ride into the waves? Who can know? 14 I am using the term “performative” to mean active and creative, not duplicitous or artificial. Performance need not be divorced from its more common associations to work in this way. For instance, a theatrical performance is not artificial. There is no fake performance of Hamlet, for instance, because each staging is its own Hamlet—legitimate in its particular context. Some performances may align more closely with popular expectation, but that does not make a non- normative Hamlet illegitimate. 15 Jean-Claude Schmitt offers a different reading of this tale. He sees the strange king as a visitor from beyond the grave and so the pact Herla makes with him is a diabolical one in nature. The resulting curse which effectively makes Herla and his men eternal specters is a punishment for making deals with the undead (112). Ultimately, I do not find Schmitt’s interpretation satisfactory, in part because the narrator does not seem to afford us such a logical moral explanation for what happens to Herla. I do, however, think it worth mentioning because it works to further complicate the identity of the king and, by hinting at a rationale which escapes the bounds of the narrative, multiplies narrative associations. 16 In Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, edited by Jeffrey Weinstock, Elizabeth T. Hayes notes that in “ethnic American cultures … the real embraces the magical, the otherworldly, and the supernatural” (173). This is one way in which they resist “rationalist binaries” of the sort I am interested in troubling here.

Chapter One: Spectral Bodies

The very envelope of human performativity — what human agency can do, beyond mundane observation and manipulation of material objects — needs itself to be seen as in the plane of practice and subject to mangling. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice

Humanity [...] does not come pre-packaged with species membership, nor does it come from having been born into a particular culture or society. It is rather something we have continually to work at. Timothy Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description

It often happens that the angels of Satan transform themselves into angels of light, and foster something of diabolical origin in human minds. To aid their recognition, I have recorded below something richly deserving to be marvelled at, which I heard from men of completely proven and sincere religion. Gervase of Tilbury, Recreation for an Emperor, Book III

On an early afternoon in mid-October, my family and I found ourselves involved in a task no one wants to do. We sat around a wooden farm table in a small flower shop in the suburbs of Detroit looking through binders full of pictures of funeral arrangements.

The shop owner was an acquaintance of my mother’s. She too owns a flower shop and so they proceeded to make small talk about the business as we leafed through the glossy pages. Perhaps it was because the man knew my mother that he decided to share with us what he no doubt expected to be a comforting sentiment. He told us that over the course of the next few days, we should be on the lookout for some type of bird. We would know it when we saw it, he assured us. The bird will seem a little odd or out of place — maybe it will sit too long on a branch or stare back at us a little too intently. There will be something knowing about its demeanor and we should pay attention to that. It is the deceased’s way of letting his loved ones know he is okay. This always happens within a few days of passing, a ritual transformation undergone as a mode of communication

35 when more typical avenues are no longer available. The man was unshakably sincere in his counsel and it is a touching idea. I must admit that I did look out the window more attentively for several weeks after this encounter, but I saw no such bird. I could never make up my mind about whether I wanted to see it.

Loss can make us think of our environment differently. Objects and places can take on new meanings, evoking emotions that may not always make sense. Some, like the man in the flower shop, look for signs and develop new ways of interpreting events that may otherwise go unnoticed. Our environments and the way we interact within them become more spectral not because we may engage in activities meant to help us connect with a specter — a ghost — but because we more readily see, experience, and interact with them as partners in communication and meaning making. This is often framed in terms of folkloric or religious knowledge and ritual, beliefs and activities that are quickly metaphorized in academic conversations. A bird symbolizes a soul that is flying away.

This type of interpretation can be productive, but it can also be reductive, dismissing or covering over the very real environmental enmeshments within which we live, love, and experience loss. If, however, we hold open meaning, allowing metaphoric, affective, and material encounters to blend into and inform one another, we make possible new orientations that allow us to appreciate more deeply the co-constructive, multi-species nature of narrative.

In “Sheep Tracks — A Multi-Species Impression” Julian Yates argues that semiotic systems are about orientation or how we approach a particular encounter (177).

Yates is interested in his orientation — and by extension, the reader’s orientation — toward sheep and the tracks they make. Through a variety of different sheep and sheepish

36 encounters, Yates reveals a complex multi-species relationship in which many different participants work together to recreate sheepishness. In the process, these other participants are also recreated. In particular, landscapes are shaped by the tracks, or physical traces of sheep presence. The result is a mode of understanding sheep-ness and sheep tracks that is collaborative, incorporating many different types of actors — sheep, soil, stone, wool, road, human, etc. This type of approach relies on a non-hierarchical way of understanding being, favoring instead participative and generative alliances. This opening up of the field of productive participants in story-making and, by extension identity-making — both human and non — can feel counter-intuitive, especially to those trained in more traditional archive-based modes of interpretation.

Reflecting on the consequences of this epistemological mode, Yates writes,

“when the specter of the nonhuman presences and provincializes human exceptionalism, I would argue that what occurs amounts to a breakdown to our various protocols of reading and crafting stories by way of our orientation to an archive” (182). Here, he uses the term

“specter” to mean something like an unseen presence of the nonhuman members of our more-than-human enmeshments.17 When the specters are made visible, so to speak, humanity no longer sits at the top of a hierarchy of being. Our orientation shifts, and with it, our ability to tell and read stories using modes previously available to us. Even what we know and how we know are challenged in these encounters. All too easily, the work of undermining an orientation that insists on a humanist hierarchy of being can frustratingly terminate as old modes of interaction take over and lead us down old roads to comfortable conclusions. We look for birds and too easily demote them to messenger, seeing only stories about human spirituality. But Yates sees in this moment of

37 epistemological conflict an opportunity. He is interested in, “holding open this hiatus and exploring other ways of configuring traces and tracks and of orienting ourselves to them lest old and familiar routines merely assert themselves and we find ourselves blissfully transported into a series of blighted repetitions” (183). Sheep stories, like bird stories, can mean many things — and they can mean in many ways. Doing interpretive and theoretical work that seeks to explore and even encourage a broadening of perspectives such that nonhuman participants are valued for more than what they do for human actors does not mean that humanist models of interaction need necessarily be overthrown but they should not stand alone. There is much to be gained from allowing ourselves to inhabit an often uncomfortable opening or gap, treating it not as a precipice over which we may fall but as an invitation, an opening up of possibility.

Yates recognizes that this opening up of perspective requires a recognition of narratives that may not automatically register as such to the human readers. For example,

Yates is interested in the traces or tracks sheep do and do not leave on the land. These tracks constitute a narrative in their own right, readable if one knows where and how to make sense of them. He explores multiple modes of track-leaving, noting mountain paths, photographs, and even an Scottish art installation as types of tracks, or evidence of the trace of sheep on landscape. None of these, however, are solely the work of sheep. Even the mountain paths, carved by many generations of hooves, have a lithic co-author. Our tracks — our writings and books — also have co-authors; they are always the result of multi-species collaborations (192). What Yates elucidates in his essay is the way we are always already entangled in more-than-human modes of telling and reading. For him, this is important because it does not require us to give up humanness or try to get outside or

38 beyond human orientations. Rather, if we become better attuned to our daily collaborations, we can more ethically engage in our enmeshed habitations.

Following Yates’ model, I propose another way of reading this potential spirit-as- bird narrative. It is a zoomorphic tale, one in which spirituality is understood, at least in part, by way of bird-ness. Working within a Christian mythology of spirituality in which this particular visioning of soul is popular, the very essence of a person has a bird-like quality to it. While I personally do not ascribe to this world view, I can say that the man’s explanation of what we ought to expect so soon after my grandfather passed away temporarily altered how I interacted with my own more-than-human enmeshments. His story—for that is what beliefs are, stories we use to frame and form understanding— made birds more apparent to me. More than that, it moved me beyond my comfortable ways of thinking about what a human is and what a bird is; it made me question, despite myself, something about my own makeup every time I saw a sparrow or a dove or a seagull. I felt a new intimacy with these creatures.

I would like to add to sheep stories and bird stories, the story of a golden ball, a tale to which I will return in chapter three. The tale appears in Gerald of Wales’s 12th century collection of tales and observations, The Journey Through Wales (Itinerarium

Cambriae), and it is framed as a true story concerning a priest named Elidyr who, in his old age, apparently related the tale to Gerald himself. As a young and rather obstinate boy, Elidyr, unhappy with the manner of education he received at school, chose to run away and hide. For two days, no one could find the boy. Finally, two men appeared who were quite small in stature. They invited Elidyr to come with them to “a land where all is playtime and pleasure,” and he quickly agreed to go (133). By way of a secret tunnel they

39 traveled into another world in which Elidyr was quickly welcomed and treated as a favored guest. He had the freedom to move between the two worlds at will and would often visit his mother, telling her tales of his second home. In these tales, the boy related that gold was a common substance in this other world and not much valued. His mother saw an opportunity for financial gain. Assuming no harm would come from the loss of a small token, she asked her son to bring her a gift of gold. Elidyr satisfied his mother’s request, stealing a golden ball he was accustomed to using as a plaything. In so doing, he transgressed one of the few rules imposed by the people of the other world — he took an object from their world into his own. Before he could even reach his mother with the gift, he was tripped by pursuers and the golden ball was reclaimed. When he attempted to return to the other world, he found that he was barred. The entrance points he had previously used were no longer accessible to him. He spent a year searching for the secret tunnel, but he never found it. The old priest greatly regretted the rash actions of his youth and could see that his theft had cost him something precious, access to a world full of the marvelous and the wondrous. In the story, the aged Elidyr laments not only the loss of the other world, but of the language that was spoken there. For him it is a double wound.

When he hears hints of this lost tongue in other languages, it causes him pain anew as he is freshly reminded of what he once had.

There are many ways to read this story. Perhaps the most readily accessible reading has to do with the economic versus the social value of objects. There is also the moral lesson one can learn from the tale about coveting and stealing another’s possessions. A reader may find herself thinking about potential cultural critiques concerning the exoticizing of other peoples and their value systems. Each of these modes

40 of narrative encounter offer productive insights and there is no reason to dismiss them out of hand. I, however, am interested in a different potential within this tale. I think Elidyr’s transgression can also function as an example of the danger of asymmetrical relationality.

He was afforded the freedom to move between two different worlds, afforded the chance to live in two very different ways. He inhabited these different spaces, and with them, different perspectives. It is when he chooses to ignore the rules in one in exchange for a possible payoff in the other that he loses this access. In the tale itself, Elidyr laments this loss, but it is unclear if we should share in his regret. He becomes a respected priest. He is reintegrated into human society after his short-lived rebellion against his academic training. The tension and resulting ambiguity in this conclusion — our inability to clearly identify whose perspective we are meant to adopt — is one that Gerald leaves open. He moves on through a chain of related ideas to other stories, other encounters and places.

This too seems a productive move to me. Elidyr has experienced a place the author and the reader have no access to and he cannot help but lament the loss of that other world.

But in relating his tale, he gives us a taste of what he can no longer attain. As I read this story, I feel most connected to this lost place not via the descriptions of the land and its people, but through Elidyr’s sorrow, his mourning that haunts him presumably to the end of his days. It is the sense of what is lost that gives me the best understanding of the substantiality of what was there. Perhaps something similar is happening in the sheep stories and the bird stories. They are about presence, but they are also about loss; they are about accessibility and inaccessibility. It is in that precarious but precious space between that metaphorisms exists.

In this chapter, I engage with stories that include spectral characters through a mesh-oriented ontological perspective. I use the concepts of agentive drift and nonstandard agency, put forth by Julian Yates and Andrew Pickering respectively, to develop a theory of spectral enmeshment in which agency is a shared or, to borrow a term from Lowell Duckert, co-implicative phenomenon, emergent and performative via affective and phenomenological encounters.18 In chapter two, I continue to follow these modes of critical encounter to move toward a theory of spectral intimacy.

I am far from the first to explore the generative theoretical possibilities spectrality offers. In fact, it is in part the abundance of haunting metaphors in critical theory that drew me to the topic.19 What I hope to contribute to the work that is already being done is a rethinking of metaphor as it is used in this context. I want to restore affective and phenomenological encounter — enmeshed experience — to the spectral metaphor, working with story to challenge standard ideas of what it means to be human and to inhabit a human body. As I do this, I build on the work of others who are moving in a similar direction, refusing to shut down the myriad potential of more-than-human encounters. When these various modes of interpretation and interaction are explored, narratives of spectral encounters forestall an enclosing, encompassing, or truncating interpretive interaction and instead invite the reader to consider the affective and phenomenological ramifications of being as metaphor.

In my usage of the term metaphor, I invoke the work of thinkers like Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen and Ian Bogost. Cohen describes metaphor as a, “conveyance device that is at once linguistic, story-laden, thingly, and agentic … [it] is an ontological sliding, a tectonic veer, materiality coming into and out of figure” (Stone 4). This way of

42 understanding metaphor posits that through metaphoric connection, figurative language literally brings the material — the figure — into language. In so doing, it veers from popular semiotic constructionist understandings of how language works and it invites us to consider how the world shapes our words. Ian Bogost uses the term in a way that may initially seem to contradict Cohen’s definition, but a closer consideration reveals a productive alliance. For him, metaphors are an inherently “self-centered” mode of relationship (Alien Phenomenology 80). He explains that this is because metaphor implies vantage point and vantage point is a centric phenomenon, a way of relating by pulling into one’s self. Because of this, he explains, human metaphorisms are always anthropocentric. He concludes that, “[a]nthropocentrism is thus both a torment [because it stops us from fully understanding a nonhuman other] and a foregone conclusion for us humans” (80). Here, one may think Bogost is arguing that metaphors are an impediment to posthumanistic thinking, but he goes on to clarify that metaphorism is not a purely human phenomenon. Nonhumans relate through comparisons to self from a nonhuman- centric vantage point. There can be “petrocentrism, photocentrism, skylocentrism” (80).

His point is that some type of centrism is inescapable because each thing — human, cat, chair, story, etc. — has a core being-ness, what he and other object-oriented ontologists often refer to as an essence, that recedes into itself. On this, Cohen and Bogost agree. For both, then, metaphor offers productive relationality between two unlike things. It allows contact where contact may not otherwise be available.

Especially apparent in Bogost’s description of metaphor is the idea that relationship through metaphor does not undo hierarchies of knowing. Like humanist philosophers, Bogost leaves the human at the top of a human hierarchy of knowing. The

43 shift he offers is by way of acknowledging that there are other hierarchies of knowing that are expressly not human and therefore do not place the human at the top. The human remains the center of the anthropos universe, but this is only one of many universes. On this point, I diverge from Bogost’s thinking, and the thinking of many object oriented ontologists. His model seems to me to be too asymmetrical, too one-sided. Instead, I would add that there is no such thing as perspectival centrism as such. Instead, it is metaphor — relationship — all the way down.

Tim Ingold, an anthropologist by trade, posits an emergent and performative theory of relationality in what he calls the meshwork.20 Here, I find an explanation of story as connection that I feel works well as an addition to Cohen and Bogost’s ideas about metaphor, offering a co-implicative and more symmetrical concept that reminds me of Yates’ sheep encounters and my own bird encounters. Ingold writes that being is storying, where storying (metaphorizing) is tracing a line of perspective (Being Alive xii,

160-161). Relationship between things is like a flow or a cloth — a mesh. Nothing is isolated. There is no bottle, no person, no idea, no story, no tree that has an existence outside the mesh. What Ingold introduces in his metaphors — lines and meshes — are spectrums of being and meaning making. No one thing or one being has a story, a perspective, apart from its enmeshed attachments. Everything relies on other things to story, to perceive, to exist. Ingold explains that because being happens through connection, properties or characteristics are “processual and relational” (30). For many, this sounds dangerously close to complete relativism and indeed, it is a form of relativism. This type of relativism, however, does not leave us in a sea of indeterminacy,

44 completely adrift. There are beings and things and meanings, but they are temporally emergent. Ingold elaborates:

[T]he function of tools, like the meaning of stories, are recognized through the alignment of present circumstances with the conjunction of the past. Once recognized, these functions provide the practitioner with the means to keep on going. Every use of a tool, in short, is a remembering of how to use it, which at once picks up the strands of past practice and carries them forward in current contexts […] Functionality and narrativity are two sides of the same coin. (57)

For Ingold, things come into alliances through histories — stories about past which, in turn, help create what we are — what things are — in the present (7-8). Things can relate to other things because they can expect certain types of alignments to have particular results based on past alliances, or past stories (encounters). This is relationality through collaboration and generative flux. It is performative relationship (29).

I suspect Ingold would not disagree with Bogost’s centric metaphorisms, but would contend that the relational encounter is more symmetrical in nature. Ingold’s enmeshed ontology stresses an interdependence and relationship between unlike things.

The difference may seem unimportant, but in it lies the seed of an essential question or, rather, a question of essence. Are things substantial in and of themselves, withholding some aspect of themselves from each encounter or are they fully performatively emergent within an encounter? Essentiality, or the lack thereof, is about access. It is about the acknowledgement of the constant work necessary to perpetuate any one ontological perspective, naturalizing any one mode or form of agency. I posit that to read metaphorisms as essentially superficial events in which the core of being of each member is untouched, unchanged, is to fall into the trap of what Bruno Latour calls blackboxing,

21 or naturalizing the functions of a thing and thus taking its relationships, its stories, for granted. Instead, metaphoristic exchanges are sites of generative and tumultuous trans-

45 formation. As such, they invite us to join Julian Yates as he “hold[s] open [the] hiatus,” refusing to shut down or shut out the teaming multitudes in even our most human stories.

Another way to put it is that things exist in a constant struggle with other things.

This is the basic concept of Andrew Pickering’s “mangle of practice.” Things exist through, “[a] temporal structuring of practice as a dialectic of resistance and accommodation […]” (xi). Bruno Latour puts it more harshly, figuring things as existing in a state of continual civil war where to stop fighting means to perish. Graham Harman, commenting on Latour’s theory, explains that: “To speak of objects in action is to convert objects from black boxes into withering trials of strength, re-enacting the torrid events that gave birth to the most obvious facts in the world” (36). For both Pickering and

Latour, the crucial point is that nothing (no thing) is a thing in isolation. Even Latour’s insistence on absolute concreteness cannot imagine a thing that exists without movement, and in fact in Science in Action, he writes that a thing is a performance (Harman 44).

Things must move to survive — they must perform, fight, attract, and connect. This is similar to Bogost’s concept of metaphorism. It is a process of metaphorizing, but one that does not necessarily imply withdrawal and separation. It does not rely on essence.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen takes this explanation a step further in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. He observes that,

Like the DNA coding of genes, narrative is full of futurity, a mysterious and not wholly predetermined site for the emergence of vitalities: a connection-making and a worlding. Narrative can give a voice to objects, elements, forces. Humans themselves emerge through ‘material agencies’ that leave their traces in lives as well as stories, so that narratives are always animated by multifarious vectors and heterogenous possibilities not reducible to mere anthropomorphism. (36)

Crucially, metaphorizing is not about explaining or defining another thing but is rather about embracing the impossibility of inhabiting a relational space that is not our

46 own while connecting to that space via shared qualities. This, according to Latour, is how any one thing can touch another thing. He calls it translation. For Ingold and Cohen, and to a smaller extent, Bogost, the key element of this connection is that it changes the things connected to and through translation or metaphor. It is a movement — an opening up, but not a replacement.

Encounters with spectral beings — ghosts, but also fairies and other human-esque figures that participate in modes of nonstandard agency — can highlight for us the way our own bodies are spectral, inextricably enmeshed and co-implicated in processes that constantly shape and reshape agentive, affective, and phenomenological possibilities. At times these figures are celebrated. Merlin, for example, most often appears as primarily a benevolent character. At other times, as we shall see in a moment, these characters are treated as threats and outcasts because of their ability to complicate the work of perspectival standardization. In this chapter, I explore how narratives of encounters with spectral beings illuminate the spectrality of embodiment. Privileging this type of narrative encounter — interpretation — with spectral stories allows me to explore nonstandard potentialities. These characters embody metaphorism, generatively linking unlike things together. In particular, I am interested in nonstandard agency of the human, or, more precisely, of actors commonly identified as human. Identity—the ability to engage through naming, to categorize based on shared characteristics — is necessary. Without it, we would be left with an inability to distinguish between types that would paralyze us.

Adopting alternative perspectives that allow us to challenge normativizing practices, however, can allow us to explore new alliances and form more intentional, more beneficial, collectives. By contrast, standardizing human — and therefore human agency

— creates and maintains an isolationist and exclusionary definition of human existence and capacity. Troubling this standard, then, allows us to think more broadly about shared or enmeshed agency.

How we understand our own limitations is a result of an unnecessarily limited understanding of what it means to be human. We continually perform human, thus perpetuating a particular experience of human. Andrew Pickering proposes that this idea is malleable and if the way we understand what it means to be human, and especially what it means to participate in standardized notions of human agency, changes then what is agentively possible could change as well. He calls this possibility nonstandard agency and speculates that it is possible only in “nondualist — explicitly posthumanist — cultures where our distinction between the human and the nonhuman are eroded” (243).

Agency, then, exists along a spectrum, though this too is limiting because the image of a spectrum imposes linear relationality on a type of connectivity that is not linear. Instead, the kind of agency we are interested in exists within the field of the spectral, the ghostly

— the porously attached.

What is needed to think enmeshments of agency is an understanding of agency akin to what Julian Yates calls agentive drift, “a way of representing agency as a dispersed or distributed process in which we participate rather than as a property which we are said to own” (Yates qtd in Duckert, “When It Rains” 128). Framing modes of enmeshment in this way allows us to think in terms of what I am calling spectral intimacy. This kind of cross-thing — cross-thinging — acknowledges the work of metaphorizing via affective and phenomenological encounters. I find a helpful example

48 of this in many late medieval tales that, as part of their ontological makeup, incorporate spectral beings— specters, apparitions, fairies, phantasms, demons.

One author that does this particularly well is Gervase of Tilbury. Writing in the thirteenth century, he records in his collection of marvels the tale of a demon disguised as a woman. The demon assumes the human identity of a French lady of the court, successfully passing for human for many years. So fully did she inhabit her role that she gave her husband no reason for misgivings except in one habit. The lady could not sit through the ritual of communion. The requisite transformation of bread into body during this ceremony had the power to evoke in her a similar and unwanted substantial change.

Both bread and lady, by virtue of the sacred ritual, underwent an essential shift, revealing a hidden nature. Unfortunately for the lady, her essential self could not endure proximity to the newly conjured presence of the holy spirit. Suspicious of her aversion to communion, the husband eventually guessed her disguise and revealed her true demonic identity. One day, as the lady prepared to leave the church before the transformation could occur, her husband and his enlisted helpers blocked her way. She was forced to cohabitate with the transubstantiated sacrament, but only momentarily for she quickly broke free of her detainers and flew away, taking a token of the encounter, part of the chapel roof, with her (Gervase of Tilbury, Recreation for an Emperor, III, 665).22

Gervase’s tale is similar to other stories about demons. Often, they come in the form of an alluring woman and their extraordinary traits are kept secret until, at the climax of the tale, they are revealed as outsiders and as characters that pose a threat to their community. They metaphorize; they make unholy connections. But it is not this ability alone that condemns them. Rather, it is the community’s understanding of the

49 contagious nature of metaphorism that ultimately compels them to distance themselves from such creatures. As threatening as this infective quality is to a social body, it is the stuff of which many medieval tales are made. Thinkers like Gervase of Tilbury seem to have been fascinated with transubstantiation, not only as it pertains to the eucharist, or deific body, but in conjunction with the human body as well.

In Walter Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles (De Nugis Curialium) we find a similar story.

The protagonist in this tale is Henno cum dentibus — Henno with the teeth. Henno happens upon a lady in the woods; she is crying. As tears pour from her, they ignite in

Henno burning desire. From the beginning, their union is unnatural; water sparks flames.

She seems to him a creature not of this world, belonging instead to the heavens — a star.

In the first few lines of Map’s tale, elemental forms compound in this monstrous character — water, air, starry matter. When Henno addresses the woman, he adds yet another feature to her composition; she is radiant, producing light. She returns the favor, calling him a flower. The narrator hints at other more sinister combinations, calling the lady angelic — the type of angel that can deceive other angels. The description is of course a reference to Lucifer, the deceptive angel of light.

In this version of the tale, the maiden pleads for protection. She has been accidentally abandoned on a foreign and dangerous shore. She asks to be in Henno’s safekeeping and Henno — the fires of desire fanned by the request — is happy to oblige.

Quickly, the two are wed and the narrator again hints at the coming disaster. The unnamed bride is a “nobilem illam pestilenciam” (347). M.R. James, the translator of the

Oxford Medieval Texts edition of Courtiers’ Trifles, renders this “brilliant pestilence,” but it is worth noting the original because of its compound nature of the term nobilem

50 which can refer to both a sense of nobility — class — and exceptionalism. Not a random insult, the designation again acknowledges a slippage in type, an instability in form. A pestilence spreads, unseen, but its results are apparent enough. To be touched by such a thing is to be both infected and incorporated — often to the point of becoming incorporeal, a spirit disengaged from its mortal body. The corporeal nature of the maiden is being called into question by the narrator. Angel-demon, light, and disease.

The new bride is immediately drawn into competition with her mother-in-law — a contest of beneficence that belies the beauty’s underlying intent. She will play the holy helper, but for her own gain. As the story progresses, the narrator’s descriptions become less subtle, as if he is afraid the reader too will be touched by her catching radiance and will become blind to the threat she poses. She might reach out from the pages and pull the reader in. Infected.

Though the lady appears nearly perfect to every eye but the narrator’s, she has one telling aversion. Like her counterpart in Recreation for an Emperor, she too avoids trans-substantive interactions, not just the sharing of the eucharist but holy water as well.

Her refusals to participate in these spiritual entanglements make her the center of suspicion. Eager to learn the cause of her daughter-in-law’s strange aversions, the mother-in-law spies on her in the bath and witnesses a remarkable transformation. The beauty becomes a dragon. Interestingly, it is in this new shape that she demonstrates her first shared trait with her husband, Henno with the teeth. She tears as her clothes with dragon fangs. Through this shared physical characteristic, Henno’s own identity seems to shift, realigning him with something not entirely human.

While in the bath, supposing she is hidden from the sight of all but her trusted maid, the lady is monstrous. Her spy does not leave after witnessing this initial transformation. She stays to watch. She sees the dragon, once dried from her bath, metamorphosed back into the beautiful bride who has deceived her son.

The story concludes in much the same way as the previous one. Once discovered, the woman breaks through the roof and escapes, never to be seen again. Map draws from this episode a lesson: “Marvel not that the Lord ascended to heaven with his body, since he has permitted such abominable creatures to do so, creatures which must in the end be dragged downwards against their will. This lady had a numerous progeny, yet living”

(349). While Gervase refrained from making the theological connection explicit, noting only that one should avoid those who do not partake in the sacraments, it seems Map could not resist. The reader is made to dwell on the multiplicity of mutations which occur in the short tale. Bread and wine to body and blood. Natural water to sacred. Beauty to beast. And, finally, two beings combine to create a lineage, a “numerous progeny” (349).

Perhaps the difference between the two versions of this tale are the consequence of Map’s interest in exploring the nature of apparitions. A nature, he willingly admits, he cannot fully understand.

What both stories share is an interest in transmutability. The first, though more simplistic, expresses a deep theological concern about the nature of the trans-substantive communion ritual. How can a piece of bread become a piece of Christ’s body? How does the bread take on the essential being of Christ while at the same time maintaining its physical bread-like properties? Similarly, how can a demon take on the form of a woman? How can material appearance change? These questions get at a deeper concern.

What is the relationship between appearance and essence? And what is the relationship between the essence of other and the essence of self? It is important that in both, the impostor has successfully inserted herself into a family. In the first, this aspect is not dwelt upon at length, but in the second it is. The dragon-demon-woman is a mother and her offspring likely share in her mutable nature. What is more, her monstrous characteristics link her to her husband. They are both recognized by their teeth. By the end of the tale, the threat of infection has surely been realized.

These stories are very similar to the romance of Melusine. The best-known version is in Jean d’Arras’s The Romans of Partenay, a romance written over a century after Gervase of Tilbury and Walter Map write of these demon-lady hybrids. This is notable not simply because it indicates an interesting literary heritage, but because it illustrates an important fluidity of genre intimately linked to ideas about transmutation, or the ability for matter — physical and ideological — to shift, to exist in a state of becoming. As James Wade notes in Fairies in Medieval Romance, when Melusine appears in medieval romances, she is a hybrid (28). Like other fairies, she is not a demon, nor is she part animal (dragon). She may take an animalistic form, but this is her prerogative as a member of the fairy folk. Wade takes pains to distinguish such creatures from other fantastical beings like angels, demons, and the myriad creatures that people texts like Mandeville’s Travels. Fairies in romances are truly supernatural, meaning that they belong to a different type of nature which is not bound by “the standard laws of logic” (1). The demon-woman in the stories above is not Melusine. Neither does she appear in a romance, but rather in texts that are themselves conglomerate, incorporating characteristics from multiple genres and traditions. In both tales, however, the unnamed

53 demon-woman does seem to subvert the laws of logic in ways similar to her better-known romance counterpart. What is less clear is why she can do this. As Wade compellingly argues, Melusine and other fairy folk can transform into other creatures because this ability to transform is an essential part of their being. It is a characteristic that belongs to these creatures, at least in the worlds of romance. In the stories which I am considering here, however, the mystery surrounding the essence of the demon-woman is precisely what makes her dangerous. In both accounts, her nature is unclear. She seems to be evil, a demon, but she does no harm and her actions disrupt nothing. Her identity, however, is another matter.

Wade argues that by the time Melusine makes her debut in Jean d’Arras’s romance, she has become a being that exists in a textual world, complete and intact.

There are recognizable traits that belong to her and these traits vary little between narratives. In other words, there is an essential Melusine. Working with possible worlds theory, Wade argues that romance worlds — or the worlds that exist within romances — are contained, existing as individual realities that may at times share characteristics with the “real” world, but that are bound to no ontological rules but their own. “Fictional texts,” he explains, “as products of storytelling, constitute worlds that are ultimately distinct from worlds beyond them” (2). This does not mean, however, that these different worlds do not share some characteristics (3). These characteristics are, of course, what makes it possible for readers to identify a work as belonging to the genre. They are also what allow readers to identify different creatures. Fairies share some characteristics across text worlds. Wade suggests, however, that it is crucial the “internal folklore” of an individual romance be recognized if a reader is to understand and analyze how an author

54 constructs a coherent fictional world (3). Through this interpretive lens, then, each romance story unfolds in a coherent and unique world. This world may share characteristics with other romance worlds and even with the “real” world — and these similarities are important for understanding how category and convention work within each world — but ultimately, no two romance worlds operate by exactly the same rules.

Each world is essential, following an inherent logic that is only truly consistent within itself. Importantly, this model of essentiality is co-creative and emergent. What Wade is describing is a performative narrative network in which the uniqueness of each individual romance is apparent because of the iteration of characteristics that allow it to be recognizable as a romance world. Some expectations must be in place for those expectations to be disrupted by peculiarity. It is through these shared expectations that one romance world can connect to another in a generative and self-sustaining mesh. It is the combination of these peculiarities and iterations that gives a romance world its sense of coherent individuality — its essence.

This ontology of romance worlds shares some similarities with the object ontologies of theorists like Ian Bogost. In Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a

Thing, Bogost makes a statement that seems counter-intuitive. He claims that both concepts and material objects are things; they exist on a flat playing field where neither is more powerful, more preeminent, than the other (24-5). What is so radical about this idea is that it gives a certain amount of autonomy and agency to the immaterial; the insubstantial can — and necessarily does — shape the material world. Magical incantations are not just the stuff of fairy tale — or rather, fairy tales are powerful things.

But to frame it this way is a little misleading because it suggests a world where words act

55 on material things and that isn’t what Bogost is going for. Instead, he is arguing for a type of “flat ontology.” He explains that, “An ontology is flat if it makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats all equally” (17). To stress the point further, he adds that, “Flat ontology suggests that there is no hierarchy of being, and we must thus conclude that being itself is an object no different from any other” (22).

What is crucial to Bogost’s idea of the equality of things, and why it is important for him that both the material and the immaterial be allowed onto the playing field, is the idea that all things are both irreducible and parts of other things at the same time. He offers an example of this concept via a list of the various aspects of the Atari videogame

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The list includes descriptions of the material components of the game, but it also includes conceptual entries like “E.T. is a sign that depicts the circumstances surrounding the videogame crash of 1983” (18). E.T. is the conglomeration of all of these different things — and many more besides, including Bogost’s own list about the system — but each thing also exists separately. It is a sign and a game and a memory and an example and an electronic system and a consumer product. The list goes on and on. Each of these things cannot be reduced to any other thing that is E.T., whether that thing be material or conceptual. But it is also the case that each of these things is an equal part of the thing that is E.T. The material things are not more or less important than the immaterial. This is what Bogost calls flat ontology and it is very similar to how Wade describes possible worlds in romance narratives.

Like Wade, Bogost insists on individuality and collectivity at the same time.23 He sees his work as part of a conversation about OOO — Object Oriented Ontology — and he indicates the simultaneity of the individual thing-in-itself and thing-as-part-of-unit as a

56 cornerstone concept of OOO. In other words, you are not talking about OOO if you are not talking about things that are necessarily separate while simultaneously being parts of something else — and this extends infinitely into the very thing of being. But, as Bogost notes, this is an extension that also collapses; it is the everything of one thing, both infinitely expansive and infinitely condensed at the same time — being itself as thing.

This is what he calls the “point of tiny ontology” (21). What this infinite expansive collapse — this black hole of being — means for Bogost is that it is impossible for anything to entirely interact with/sense/know any other thing. Things infinitely recede

(22). For Bogost, this is the heart of alien phenomenology — and the act of metaphorizing, which is what alien phenomenology looks like in practice.

Taking Wade and Bogost together, what we get is a theory of imaginative world as object — a mesh of connection. Metaphorizing is this mesh of connection. It is contact by proxy that maintains at the essence of every story — every narrative interaction — a conglomeration of more-than-human enmeshments. Thinking of story in this way allows us to engage with the Melusine-esque narratives of Gervase of Tilbury and Walter Map’s texts in embodied ways, both affective and phenomenological. It also allows us to consider how the act of storying is itself performative, relying on agentive drift via metaphorizing to both stabilize and undermine standardized modes of conceptualizing agency.

Graham Harman argues that all things, not just stories, have individual essences.

Each object has an essence that forever recedes from encounter. Timothy Morton goes on to explain that this essence — he distinguishes interest in essence from essentialism — is even unknowable to the object itself: “Even a coral reef can’t guess its essential coral

57 reefness” (Realist Magic 44). Morton claims that this unknowability is of the utmost importance because it separates an object from entanglements that might otherwise threaten its very ability to exist. For both Morton and Harman, each object must exist for its own sake and not for the sake of the perception of any other object. To draw on

Morton’s example, even the coral reef cannot exist for the perception of the coral reef. It must be something else — imperceptible even to itself (44). According to this ontology of essence, we live in a world crowded with separateness. Every object exists in a type of intimate isolation, very near other things, and interacting with other objects on a surface level, but never truly being touched, changed, or known. Andrew Pickering offers another ontology of essence, one that links ontology inextricably with epistemology, resulting in a world that does not only include story, but is story itself.

In The Mangle of Practice, Andrew Pickering offers a detailed account of a process he calls conceptual mangling (81-86). He explores how knowledge — especially scientific knowledge — is made through work. Facts, realities, are made through practice, which is to say that they are made through work and repetition. His question is not primarily about the nature of humans. There are certainly many other writers who have taken up this question more directly. Perhaps because his project is not primarily concerned with this issue, he makes a claim that is much bolder than those made by many others more consistently focused on the nature of the human by introducing the ideas of nonstandard agency, or agency that does not fit within our culturally acceptable definitions of what is possible. In so doing, he restructures the question about the productivity of anthropomorphism by pointing out that our understanding of what it means to be human is malleable and susceptible to change. That understanding is

58 culturally constructed, a result of the stories we tell about ourselves and our relationships with our environments. He offers a way to think about what it would look like for concepts — language, stories — as things to co-create alongside material things, each constituting the other. What Pickering offers through his intricately detailed account is something like a freeze-frame, step-by-step snapshot of enmeshment. It is an impossible perspective, truly speculative, but productive because it makes possible a conceptualization of how enmeshment and Bogost’s infinitely dense dot can co-exist.

Time, and thus movement, would need to stop in order for Bogost’s infinitely receding things to be truly individual. However, if we are talking about agency and phenomenological experience, we are, at least at some level, talking about individual things. This can only be the case if we understand things through a performative framework as always emergent — individual only once they have already mixed with something else. Things and thing-stories are powerful because they are conglomerate and not entirely knowable, just as the demon-women in the Melusine-like tales of Map and

Gervase of Tilbury.

We can take this idea a step further and claim that essence is story. It is an aesthetic stabilization of a moving multitude, of agentive drift. As such, the essence of a thing, an identity, and a narrative is entirely performative and emergent. The essence of what it means to be human is performative and emergent, which means that we continually re-create it through story with nonhuman others. We standardize because nonstandardization is possible — always. It just takes a change in story — a shift in perspective that allows us to glimpse the continual work of making the human by excluding ambiguities, deviations, and trans-species, trans-substantial, partnerships.

Specters dwell at the edge of our emergent performative standardization as those things that are excluded in the process of standardizing. Interpreting ghosts and other spectral creatures as metaphors for those persons, events, ideologies, and general others which must be excluded as part of the process of identity making is certainly not a new idea.

These interpretations, however, often too quickly shut down alternative modes of interacting with spectral and spectralizing stories. Relegated to the realm of the sign, spectrality in narrative is deprived of material agencies. This relegation is, however, artificial because signs are material. They have substance, consequence, relationship.

Here, I find stories containing demonic or demon-like characters particularly pertinent.

These stories explore the question of essence in intriguing ways, often with a sense of urgency to categorize and thus dismiss those who seem to insist on slipping through ontological cracks. By attending to the material agencies of spectrality in these and other specter speculative tales, and in particular the affective and phenomenological enmeshments within which spectral stories engage, we can challenge the standardized conceptualization of human agency.

Through Walter Map’s description of her, we are led to surmise that Henno’s wife is a demonic character. Her essence — her true identity — becomes problematic when her nonstandard characteristics are revealed. She can shape shift. In her alternative form, her body looks more like the body of a reptile than that of a human. However, because of medieval beliefs about essence, there is no concern that she is part human and part reptile. It is another transgressive identity that attaches itself to her. Instead, she is suspected of being a demon, a spirit creature who is not bound by the same material rules as the human — or the reptile, for that matter — but is nonetheless a very real part of the

60 natural world. Reading Gervase of Tilbury’s explanation of the difference between miracles and marvels or wonders through Thomas Aquianas’ description of demons,

Robert Bartlett stresses that demonic creatures are commonly understood to be a legitimate part of nature during the time period. Their presence within the natural order as creatures capable of subverting natural law as it applies to other creatures was not a contradictory or problematic notion for thinkers like Gervase of Tilbury and Walter Map

(The Natural and the Supernatural 18-20). Instead, this perspective allows them to experience the natural world as an open system, capable of nonstandard action. Nature, then, is like Elidyr before his transgression. And Elidyr, with his access to different worlds that operate in seemingly incompatible ways, is somewhat like a demon. He cannot shapeshift like Henno’s wife, but he can accomplish a kind of space shifting not common to other humans. I will explore the potential revealed in this space shifting in chapter three, but here I want to dwell with Henno’s wife, reveling in her trans- substantial profundity. Equally important is how her spectrality sends ripples through her community and her story, spectralizing expectation and threatening standardized identity.

Because of her deviant qualities, Henno’s wife poses a threat to the community and must be exorcised. Her metamorphosis and resulting expulsion from the narrative can be read as an uneasiness or even a denial of the feminine body and the transformations it undergoes. It can also be interpreted as a rejection of ethnic, cultural, and religious otherness. All of these interpretations have merit and each allows us to explore important cultural issues. Again, there is no reason to dismiss these modes of encounter but if we stop here, we unnecessarily sacrifice an attention to agentive drift, or the agency of spectrality.

The active assumption in the story is that the transubstantial nature of Henno’s wife is essential to her being. It is part of who she is and not something that emerges because of the volatility of her circumstances or environment. There is no mention, for example, of a curse. She is found abandoned on the shore and so her origin is unknown, though we could make some educated guesses based on where she was found and why she was traveling. Her unknown origin does not factor in as an outside influence but rather another essential trait. She is of a particular country and people not revealed in the story and she is also of no particular country and people, mysterious and nearly alone

(she retains one maid). These observations can lead us to some interesting interpretations, hinted at in the previous paragraph, but I want to propose another way of approaching this demonic character, one that I feel better fits her multivalent persona. Following the model of the natural world laid out by Gervase and Aquinas, I see no reason to make

Henno’s wife answer to one identity, one set of rules, alliances, and associations. Demons may seem to trouble a stable understanding of what can naturally take place in the world.

We are not accustomed to seeing a human woman transform into the shape of a serpent.

This is as much the case for Gervase and Aquinas as it is for us. The difference is they are working from a worldview in which contradiction does not mean catastrophe. Demons are indeed dangerous, but not because they are unnatural. This worldview opens up potentialities rather than shutting them down, inviting encounters and meanings to compile without need of perspectival hierarchy. For me, this is where the idea of essence as the term is often used by object oriented ontologists breaks down. Once one insists on a stable unchanging perspective which exists as an essential part of each being, object, narrative encounter — once one treats metaphor and, by extension story, contact,

62 knowledge as an asymmetrical endeavor — too many demons are exorcised. Too many specters disappear. We risk becoming Henno and his neighbors who, threatened by the

Melusine-like character’s ability to disrupt standard ideas about categorical identity, chase her away, uprooting her from a community of which she had been a beneficial member.

It is important to clarify: I am arguing that many late medieval writers like

Gervase of Tilbury and Walter Map embraced a more open-ended understanding of what is possible within the natural world, an understanding that can easily incorporate contradictory models of agency without breaking down. I am celebrating their understanding of demons as creatures of the natural world that act in ways not fully understandable to them, but not entirely alien either. I see this as a productive perspective that offers generative ways to think agency and being, but it does not treat all “allowable” entities as equals. To quote Ian Bogost, “All things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally” (Alien Phenomenology 11, italics original). Similarly, Walter Map makes it very clear that while the woman who can transform into a dragon does not pose a direct threat to ideas about what alliances are possible in the natural world, she is not on equal footing with the other characters of the story. He leaves no doubt that she is meant to be read as the antagonist. He describes her as a pestilence, something able to infect and change those around her. Ultimately, her community rejects her because while she fits into their concept of the natural world, she still poses a threat to alliances that are crucial to their identity as a community. God allows demons. He does not embrace them.

The metaphor Map uses to let the reader know the woman who can transform is not to be celebrated is quite telling in several important ways. As I mentioned above,

Map uses the language of illness, marking her as an infective agent (347). A pestilence does not challenge the natural order, but it is still a threat because it can transform those who come into contact with it. Animals, human and nonhuman, as well as plant life, can become sick and even die from its influence. She makes too evident the volatility of social and organic bodies. She makes too evident what I argue is a natural instability — an incessant need to do the work of stabilization and meaning-making. It is important to note, however, that her body and her identity are not endlessly transformative. If they were, Henno’s mother would not be able to recognize telltale traits that led her to question the identity of the new wife. Other characters are also able to identify Henno’s wife as different and potentially dangerous because knowledge networks help them make comparisons between her characteristics and characteristics belonging to the standard human, as well as deviant characteristics that might mark her as a demon or other type of malevolent being. To use Wade’s term, the internal folklore of the tale is mobilized to make the wife’s identity legible.

While the internal folklore — which, in this case, is connected to medieval ideas about what types of agencies are possible in the natural world — incorporates nonstandard modes of being, those modes are ultimately used to further standardize human modes of being. Reading Henno’s wife as human would require a reworking of the determining characteristics of the category human. In the process, it would not release her from the work of metaphorizing, but rather it would induct the concept of humanity

— and all those who identify as human — into this work as well. Henno’s wife is a story because all things are stories. She is interpreted because all things are interpreted. This is not to say that reality is entirely relativistic or semantically constructed. Rather, it is

64 performative and emergent. It requires contact and work; it requires story. But story is never just human. It is spectral and spectralizing.

Julian Yates, in Error, Misuse, Failure, similarly acknowledges the dependence of human identity on nonhuman collaborators, though with a more reserved understanding of human embodiment. He writes, “[H]istory figures a human face, for it is the irreducible rhythms of our bodies that are its occasion. And yet, for as long as we neglect the role of nonhumans in our midst, all that the word ‘human’ promises, the social, ethical, and political hopes it founds, will continue to escape us. It is this radical rethinking of the ‘human’ that is our present challenge, and the ethico-political duty confronting those strongly divided institutions we call the ‘sciences’ and the

‘humanities’” (207). As Yates rightly points out, the goal of this type of narrative engagement is to facilitate change through awareness. Human is a metaphorical category that, like all metaphorical categories, links meanings — knowings through contact — together. When the work of metaphor is covered over, human becomes a privileged category that enables us to ignore shared agency and shared responsibility.

Stories that include spectral and apparitional figures make more visible spectralization because they raise issues concerning the essence of the human metaphor by presenting it in ways that complicate accepted or standardized models of human agency.

While the Melusine-like stories in the texts of Map and Gervase of Tilbury may not immediately register for the 21st century reader as belonging to the same narrative category as stories about the spirits of the deceased, and indeed they are different in some ways, they share a common concern over the essence of the human category and they do

65 so in terms that make more readily apparent how human typically works as metaphor, hiding performative and emergent spectralization inherent in this mode of embodiment.

As I reflect on these stories, I am reminded of the birds that so abruptly invaded my consciousness during that October several years ago. My awareness of my attachments to the nonhumans that crowd and create my existence was born of a deeply emotional experience — a human loss. It is strange to think that it would take that human element to make me pay more attention to what my daily encounters with nonhumans might mean, how they shape not only the way I understand my world, but the way I inhabit my own body. And it is this human-bird writing machine, to use Julian Yates’ phrase, that for me most clearly communicates both the stakes and the possibilities of holding open that interpretive gap and resisting the urge to exorcise human or nonhumans in our narrative encounters.

17 In the glossary of Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour explains that the concept of the nonhuman “has meaning only in the difference between the pair ‘human-nonhuman’ and the subject-object dichotomy. Associations of humans and nonhumans refer to different political regime from the war forced upon us by the distinction between subject and object. A nonhuman is thus the peacetime version of the object: what the object would look like if it were not engaged in the war to shortcut due political process. The pair human-nonhuman is not a way to ‘overcome’ the subject-object distinction but a way to bypass it entirely” (308). 18 See “It’s Co-Implicated, AVMEO: Drifting with John Muir, Speaking Stones, and a Slower (Non)humanities,” George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute blog, posted Friday, March 18, 2011. 19 For more on what Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock calls the “spectral turn” in contemporary literary theory, see the introduction to Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Weinstock convincingly argues that “phantoms have become a privileged poststructuralist academic trope” because they are “interstitial figures that problematize dichotomous thinking” (4). 20 I am using performative to mean something that must be continually performed or created through work. For an explanation of how Bruno Latour uses the term performativity and how it differs from its use in the works of J.L. Austin and Judith Butler who first introduced the term into critical discussions about agency, see Prince of Networks. Graham Harman writes that Latour sees the “essence of a thing” resulting from “its public performance in the world, and this respect he does agree with certain postmodernist currents. Yet one can hardly imagine the Judith Bulters acknowledging the ‘performativity’ of inanimate objects as well as of human actors. In this way,

Latour strikes a tacit blow against every version of speech act theory; what he gives us is not speech-act theory, but actor-act theory” (66). 21 “A black box is any actant so firmly established that we are able to take its interior for granted” (Prince of Networks 73). 22 Here and elsewhere, I use the word transubstantiation in a way that is meant to echo the sacred – or secretive – act of Christ becoming bread and wine. How this process takes place was a matter of much debate in the medieval church, and the interpretive stakes were high. The very nature of substance – of matter in its physical and ideological form – rested on the way one understood the mechanics of this ritual. I simultaneously use the term to make my own interpretation of the nature of substance; everything is trans/substantial, existing in a space between. It is a space of making and motion, of translation and uncertainty. Like the Christian ritual, this interpretation is founded not in logic, but in faith. 23 In his essay “Inhuman Nature,” Bogost provides a great example of this using Bisclavret, a lai about a werewolf, written in the 12th century by Marie de France. In the tale, Bisclavret seems to be both the name of the knight who transforms into a wolf and a term that actually means werewolf. Bogost convincingly argues that bisclavret is best described as a term that designates not one version of the main character—the knight or the wolf—but rather the transformation itself. Bogost’s essay can be found in the book by the same name, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

Chapter Two: Spectral Intimacy

Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

The mesh is vast yet intimate; there is no here or there, so everything is brought within our awareness. The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

A Welshman of evil life died of late unchristianly enough in my village, and straightway after four nights took to coming back every night to the village, and will not desist from summoning singly and by name his fellow-villagers, who upon being called at once fall sick and die within three days, so that now there are very few of them left. Walter Map, Courtiers’ Trifles

In Courtiers’ Trifles, a twelfth century collection of tales, musings, and observations about late medieval court life, Walter Map tells the story of a haunted village. Like many of the stories in this collection, it takes place within Map’s lifetime and involves an historical figure.24 After the death of an unnamed man, a village in Wales became plagued by ghostly visits. The restless spirit adopted the habit of calling his neighbors to join him in his afterlife. He lay in his grave only four nights before he began making a nightly trek into town. During each of his visits, he called the name of a fellow villager and each time, the villager died within three days (203). The specter’s requests seem malevolent in nature—they result in the deaths of several of his fellow villagers. He may seek reunion, even intimacy, with those he lived among in life, but his methods prove fatal for those to whom he beckons. His call is infecting and those who hear their name find themselves unable to refuse a terrifyingly transformative entanglement.

This specter seeks a communion that was likely denied him in life. Map explains that he died “unchristianly.” Beyond the borders of community religious ties, this man was an outcast in death too. Perhaps it is this otherness, this living outside the borders of the community, that deprives him of a restful grave. For William Laudun, an English knight who is called upon by the villagers to intercede on their behalf, the specter’s actions are interpreted as threats. Laudun wishes to sever the ties this unruly revenant seems to still feel between himself and the village of which he was a resident. No more of his fellow villagers should be required to leave their mortal lives to accompany this haunting entity. He must be exorcised, cut off from his social context. Indeed, as the story develops, we realize that severing social ties is not enough; his material body must be rent asunder as well. Nothing of William Laudun’s neighbor can be left intact. Taking from him his head means he can no longer call—no longer make unexpected visitations or extend unwanted invitations. He is deprived of his ability to seek intimacy, though that does not mean he is left alone. He will become a member of a different kind of community, one that will feed on him, ingesting his corpse as the ultimate act of incorporation.

In the previous chapter, I explored how Julian Yates’s concept of agentive drift can be paired with Andrew Pickering’s idea about nonstandard agency to develop a theory of spectral enmeshment. Using stories that contain spectral characters and/or encounters, I considered how metaphor does more than link similar ideas, experiences, and characters. Instead, it is a transformative mode of relationship-making through contact. Building on the work of Ian Bogost, Tim Ingold, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and

Bruno Latour, I argued that this type of enmeshed connection is how things become—

how they exist within a state of process—whether that becoming is a becoming cup, cockroach, comb, or carbuncle. Through these metaphorizing encounters, we can begin to question standardized models of agency and embodiment.25 By so doing, we begin to break down anthropocentric perspectives that quarantine humanity, both to protect from infecting forces and to control how humans infect their more-than-human ecologies.26

This idea of cordoning off to control is closely linked to medieval and modern concerns about disease. Terms like “pestilence” and “infection” are commonplace in discourses—modern and medieval—about ecological hierarchies. The language of illness most often feeds on concerns about contamination. Human bodies are contaminated by foreign chemicals. Communal bodies are contaminated by foreign cultures. Natural ecologies are contaminated by foreign species. As I argue in the first chapter, however, contamination via metaphorizing is a vital activity, one upon which we all—members of vital imbroglios—must depend. For this reason, in this chapter I turn to the concept of intimacy. Spectral and spectralizing, our intimate relationships are the stuff of which we are made and remade—devoured and derived. The way in which I discuss what I call spectralizing encounters is closely linked to Bruno Latour’s ideas about blackboxing, or taking for granted the stability of an assemblage. In the glossary section of Pandora’s

Hope, Latour provides the following definition of blackboxing: an “expression from the sociology of science that refers to the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become” (304). Latour’s definition acknowledges the original context of the term,

but it has since been applied to any entity, idea, or event within which the work of assemblage is “opaque and obscure.” Blackboxing covers over the work—struggles and attractions, infections and expulsions—that make up the substance of all things. The paradox Latour mentions is an important one. A black box is the result of a success and as such, the work of revealing and dissecting one is often met with unease. Spectralizing encounters disassemble black boxes and are always disarming. By their very nature, they are unsettling. They reveal the intimacies that make us and our ecologies, challenging us not to take bodies and other corpuses for granted. Using Ian Bogost’s ideas about friction points and transformations alongside Timothy Morton’s concept of the strange stranger, I build on spectral embodiment and adventure into the space between, the mediating- meridian, as a seeker of spectral intimacies.

The depths of a forest, hidden from civilizing gaze, has long been a space associated with unexpected and transformative encounters. It seems fitting to begin my search there. I turn to a medieval tale of a startling intimacy in which man and wolf combine to create a monstrous hybrid.27 Ian Bogost finds a fitting metaphor for such intimacies in the story of Bisclavret, a lai written by Marie de France in the twelfth century.28 It is the narrative of a faithful knight who, several times a week, has the habit of transforming into a werewolf. In most werewolf stories, attention is drawn to what happens when the person is a human and when he is wolf; the two sides of the spectrum take precedence. Bogost suggests that this medieval tale focuses on something different—not on the extremes but on the moment of transformation itself. This, for

Bogost, is the heart of the tale. Bisclavret, the narrator tells us, is a French word that means something similar to a werewolf. As Bogost points out, the actual origins of the

term are mysterious. But this is not the only meaning “bisclavret” has in this story; it is the main character’s name as well.29 He is called Bisclavret in his human form and is also a bisclavret by virtue of the transformation he undergoes. For Bogost, it is the transformation that is important: “If you stop to think about it, the remarkable thing about being a respected knight for half the week and a silvan wolf for the other is not so much being a wolf or a knight, but of becoming either a wolf or knight: in the transformation itself” (“Inhuman” 137). It is this in-between space that constitutes the center of the story.

Typically, the narrative is read as a tale of betrayal and Bogost notes that betrayal is integral to the crafting of Bisclavret, but he reads it in a less sinister light.30 After much prodding, Bisclavret confides in his wife that he is only able to return from his wolf state when he puts on his human clothes. Slyly, she waits until Bisclavret leaves for one of his weekly transformations and she tracks him. A spectator to the change, she watches as he runs on all fours into the woods. When she is alone, she takes his clothes, ensuring that he will not be able to transform again. Her ploy is partly successful; Bisclavret is made to continue in his wolf form for quite some time, but then his good manners bring him back into the company of his king. He takes on the posture of a humble dog before the feet of the king, demonstrating through loyalty and protection that chivalry is a more than a human domain. His attitudes make it apparent that he is a thing in between, not wholly man nor wholly animal. A wise member of the court recognizes Bisclavret as a bisclavret bereft of his defining ability to transform and, finally, Bisclavret is given the tools and privacy to transform again, or rather to become a transform, which is to say a form in motion. The necessary privacy is important and in this, Bisclavret is not unlike

Melusine.31 Becoming is an intimate endeavor. It leaves those involved vulnerable,

reliant for survival on strange sensual contacts, laying bare the inner workings of the act of being. Bisclavret is himself a site of transformation, of making via intimate sensual contact, but at this moment, he is also a wolf that undergoes the process of turning into a man. If there were spectators, he would be rendered stranger still as his very state of embodiment, his ability to be substantial—one thing or another thing—melts away. On one level, it makes sense that Bisclavret would not want witnesses. He would not want to be exposed and put his nakedness on display. Bogost, however, does not allow us to read this desire for secrecy in moments of transformation as applicable only in extreme cases.

It is not only the bisclavret that is made vulnerable and exposed in these instances of intimacy. Rather, all things undergo transformations; all things are their becomings, their naked makings, their bisclavrets (143). These intimacies teem, touch, and create. Only from a distance do their conglomerations seem substantial. Only in retrospect can they come together around a name.

After his transformation, the king finds Bisclavret, now in the shape of a man, asleep in the king’s chamber. This too is an intimate encounter. As his knight sleeps in his very bed, the king’s dependence on those who serve him is made evident. Knights transform men into kings. That transformation is no less strange, no less hybrid, than the ones through which man becomes wolf and wolf becomes man. And often, it is no less hidden, no less secretive. The seeming stability of both positions are instances of blackboxing, of being as category—human or wolf, king or subject. But spectral intimacies, or intimate encounters in which the spectrality of the act of being is made more visible, trouble the integrity of black boxes. Bogost’s insight about the nature of the bisclavret is a spectralizing one because it draws attention not to a seemingly stable state

of a being, but to the constant transformative work of being. The unnamed, perhaps unnamable, specter that haunts William Laudun is no different; it exists in an in-between place and, as we will see, its state is infectious. It is through intimate contact, concealed trans-being, that things exist. In chapter one, I used the term transubstantiation to discuss this quality of between-being. Here, I offer up the sacred substantial to specters in the hopes that they will haunt more openly.32

In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton makes the argument that we are all involved in a startling kind of intimacy, defined within and without by relationships with what Morton calls strange strangers. The strange stranger is who or what, or who-what, we meet in the mesh. Because the mesh is both co-creative and goalless, one cannot anticipate a strange stranger; it can take any form and even when we face it, the strange stranger can change before our eyes (40). Morton explains that he developed this term in part so he can avoid using a human/animal dichotomy when thinking enmeshed relationship; the category animal, he argues, “shows how humans develop intolerances to strangeness and to the stranger” (41). The concept of the strange stranger allows Morton to describe relationships in which independence is not possible. Paradoxically, strangeness is the essence of closeness, but it is not a cozy kind of closeness. This mesh of strangers, as Morton describes it, is estranging. We are estranged from our comfortable categories, our propensities for naming and knowing. We trade them in for speculation.

We cannot know what is around the corner, but something makes the spine tingle with anticipation. What is watching us? Whose cold hand brushes ours? Like Laudun’s neighbor, we are called into relationships that transform us – or, rather, they form us through their sensual transitions and intimate touches. We wake within a vastness that

defies an I. This kind of contact is dislocating and we find we are alien to our own notions of individualism, of self. If one takes this seriously, the thought should be unsettling. Within such a vastness, intimacies—creative contact between strangers—carry no guarantees. Touching can take the form of a caress, but it can also be a combative blow. Desire drives—pulling and pushing—but it is not a desire that knows its aim in advance. Among strangers, desire is the name we give to movements into and out of intimacies; it is not a characteristic of consciousness, or purposiveness. Rather, it is the state of the transformative—the movement between forms.

When intention is no longer center stage, one form of contact is not better or worse than another. Morton pictures enmeshment as a radical kind of closeness. He explains that, “When we consider the mesh, we must drop this ‘one at a time’ sequencing” which allows us to read nature through “an aesthetic of ‘cuteness’”—the fuzzy baby seal, the miniature frog slowly climbing a branch (38). These creatures are cute only when they are deprived of their entire context. A wolf pup is adorable when playing with its brothers and sisters; it is less so when devouring a bloody rabbit. Yet, to imagine the pup without the rabbit is to recreate it as a thing outside of its vital context. It is to pass judgement—this type of intimacy, play, is better than another, ingestion. But this is not how intimacy works in our tales of specters. Enmeshed nature entangles, muddles, ensnares. It is multitudes, and as Morton asserts, “cuteness doesn’t come in multitudes” (38). Contact with the strange stranger dislocates, reorients, expands us beyond a self, making us not only partners in intimate exchange, but intimacy itself. As

Michel Serres explains, we touch and are our touch (The Five Senses 26).

Narrative is an invitation to intimate contact and it also enacts this contact. It is how we know and are known, not just to human others but to our compatriot specters.

Exploring these spectral intimacies requires a mode of narrative engagement that broadens the way we typically think of story context. An enmeshed perspective means that stories threaten to unravel at their ends—they wobble as they spin, disaligning causality and disallowing superficial sympathies. We are moved along with our tales.

They are our journeys, our ways of reaching and becoming. As such, we must prepare to be touched, agitated, moved and smoothed as bones in water. As phantoms in a phantasmagoria. Listen again to the invitation from the ghost who haunts William

Laudun. As the Welshman soon realizes, spectral intimacies can be volatile. They often defy normative practices of naming, knowing, containing.

The tale of Laudun and his restless neighbor evokes the tradition of the unquiet spirit, but it refuses the traditional remedy for menacing ghosts, thereby thwarting a purely theological frame for the occurrence, and instead insisting that the reader revisit and revise his or her expectations about the way a medieval writer might interpret a spectral encounter and the way we encounter the specters of our own narrow ideas about ideological systems of the past. The shift is an important one because it informs not only how we think about history and heritage, but how we think about the relative stability/instability of the presumptions about ecological enmeshment we inherit. The average reader unfamiliar with medieval texts—and even the reader who is quite familiar with them—will likely expect that Laudun’s problem will be fixed by the church. The phantasm who haunts the village is not a Christian. His behaviors seem to threaten a

Christian community. A priest or other ecclesiastical character will come to the rescue,

reestablishing the authority of the Christian church through this instance of subversion.

But when Laudun looks to the church for his answer, he is let down. They cannot solve the problem. When this avenue fails, a character in a medieval story about a haunting might next look to a “wise folk” character. This character often reestablishes a Christian logic to the narrative even though he or she may not be directly related to the church.

Laudun, however, is left to his own devices. Perspectival shift is forced on him by his haunting encounter with the ghost who eventually calls his name. He reassesses and must seek to make new alliances, new tools, and new modes of engagement. The encounter will be a transformative one for all participants involved. Either the restless neighbor will stop his solicitations or Laudun will be counted among the newly dead. Likewise, the body of knowledge Laudun draws upon as he makes his speculations will undergo a transformation. If he can solve the riddle posed by the solicitous neighbor, the tale will be added to a corpus of knowledge about how to handle unwanted spectral encounters. If, however, he is unsuccessful, it will leave narrative tradition in a precarious position. We can see a hint of this anxiety over the unpredictability of meaning-making encounters in

Map’s insistence on rooting Laudun firmly in an historical and geographical context. The contest is not only between the living and the dead, but between wielders of different narrative traditions. Inside the moment of crisis, Laudun’s concerns are less metaphorical, less abstract. He is in a contest for his life.

Meaning-making is always a personal action, an intimate struggle. Laudun is a fighter. He initiates and agitates, chasing the ghost to the edge of his own grave, making him return home bereft of the company he eagerly sought. He recedes into the earth, existing now only as part of a story in which he is bereft of a name. Laudun successfully

puts an end to the wanderings and unwanted invitations of the intrusive phantasm. He has protected his community, though he had to move beyond the pre-established authorities to do it. He had to work outside of the accepted tradition. In his pursuit of the dead man, he became the one who willingly came to the threshold of the outcast’s home, accepting his invitation and perhaps—even if just for a moment—his perspective.

In the tale, Laudun occupies the role of hero; he polices the borders of his community, presumably to keep them safe. He is a protector and a filter, pushing away potential contaminants. In this spectral encounter, Laudun enforces boundary lines, keeping the living apart from the dead though, as I mention above, he has to cross those lines to reinforce them.33 When he comes home again, does Laudun carry with him a faint smell of death? Has he touched and been touched by the decay, marked as he enforced social markers? Let us travel for a moment to the edge of the grave with Laudun and his restless neighbor. What understanding might happen at this threshold? What if, in this in between space at the edge of town, the edge of a grave, teetering between air and earth, the ghost is not who the narrator claims he is? He is not a malefactor who brings evil into his own community. What if we meet him in the role he seems to want to occupy—host? Then would his invitation take on new meaning? Must his death call be malevolent? Might it instead be a summons to join in a different kind of relationality?

Following this specter prompts speculation and a new way of seeing—and hearing. This village dweller, ignored or ostracized in life, takes it upon himself to form community in death.34 In so doing, he calls others to mingle bodies with soil, landscape, and legend.

Laudun’s restless neighbor enacts a different type of intimacy, making community through sound that incorporates in its touch, transforms in its vibrations, carries on in its

resonating. It is a disquieting idea, one that might seem appropriate only to a madman, someone who has abandoned reality, accepted relationalities. For that is what reality is, the story we circulate and pass along about the relationship between ourselves and our environments. As is the case with every story, it is not only human. It is relative in a vast enmeshment that does not bend to any one will.

In accordance with medieval burial practices, a person who dies “unchristianly” cannot reside within the sacred space of a communal church burial ground. He must be laid to rest in a place set apart for those who do not conform to communal standards. His ambiguous mode of death, simply explained as “unchristian,” marks a type of trauma, a dramatic cutting off from what came before. In modern ghost stories, specters often inhabit places in which they experienced trauma, bound to people, objects, even temporalities, through a deeply decentering experience from which they cannot make meaning. This seems to be the case in Map’s ghost story as well. Outcasts haunt; they are those who fail in an act of incorporation and so must seek alternative intimacies.35

Perhaps in death this man formed alliances he could not access in life. Transformed, he has acquired the ability to transform his kindred in kind. He calls them by name, extending a form of intimate contact denied him by the teller of the tale. This act of calling is not immaterial; it is creative. It makes things happen. For Michele Serres, sound vibrates, creating vital and material connections between those things it touches. In

“Noise,” Serres argues that “Space is completely invaded by noise; we are completely occupied by the same noise. The agitation is everywhere to be heard, beside the signals, beside the silence” (50). In this passage, Serres is particularly interested in noise at sea— it is a decidedly nonhuman noise, and yet it vibrates through human bodies. In fact,

bodies cannot escape this vibration; they must be moved with sound. Laudun’s neighbor utters names—human speaking to human—but that does not negate the nonhumanness of the sound vibrations that move through his dead body and into the bodies of his soon to be dead neighbors. Incorporative, he creates vibrant—vibrating—affective communities, though there is no guarantee these attachments are amiable. Intimacy does not always denote conviviality; intimate connections are made through love, allure, trauma. But these connections are always transformative.

In the next section, I seek a different kind of specter—a speculative monster. It is a transit system, or the idea of what a transit system could be. Created miscreate, formed and deformed again, Aramis is a hybrid. Terminally defunct, it laments that its makers did not love it enough. It was deprived of the ability to partake in transformative intimacies. Aramis’s allure is undeniable but, like Laudun’s neighbor, its siren’s call does not collect a community substantial enough to sustain it. It becomes the name of an almost thing, a suspended transit formation.

***

Spectrophilia Why do you turn your heads away? Am I a Medusa, then, I whom you so loved? … Of all the sins, unconsummated love is the most inexpiable. Burdened with my prostheses, hated, abandoned, innocent, accused, a filthy beast, a thing full of men, men full of things. I lie before you. Eloi, eloi, Lama lama sabachthani. Bruno Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology

Why have you forsaken me? A cry, an accusation, a plea issuing not from a monstrous beast or a forsaken deity, but the failed transit system, Aramis. Ideas, conversations, drawings and diagrams, maps, manufactured parts, prototypes, dreams — Aramis is monstrous in his many forms and, like the monster abandoned by Frankenstein with

whom Aramis so readily identifies, it exists in between — “a thing full of men, men full of things” (158).

But what does it mean to be a thing full of actants who are themselves full of other actants? In tales of the Melusine-esque women I explore in chapter one, the women were banished because others in their respective communities saw them as a threat. I have proposed that one way to understand their fear is as a reaction to a character that complicates their ontological framework concerning the human category. Similarly, these female characters could maintain their identities as nonhuman others while playing the part of humans. What is a husband to make of that? A mother-in-law? A community? A church? These stories of quasi-demon-women deal with physical, ideological, and spiritual transformations, or the lack thereof, and explore questions concerning the nature of essentiality and performativity. Aramis’s story transports these quandaries into a context of modern technology. How can a technology exist and mean even as it takes on many different forms? Latour uses the term “actor” to refer to a target of action and a swarm, and actant to mean a figuration of agency (Reassembling the Social 46; 54-55).

His description of Aramis prompts the question: How can it team with actors and be an actor itself?

Aramis’s story begins in 1969 when the French engineering company Matra started working on a personal rapid transit system to be used in Paris, France. Over the next seventeen years, the project would be dropped only to be picked up again, lauded only to be dismissed. Each cycle of enthusiasm was followed by another of anxiety or ennui. It seemed Aramis could not maintain one identity. Too quick to transform, it was hard to translate, hard to fully comprehend. It shared Melusine’s morphic tendencies,

especially when behind closed doors. New members came to the project, each with new ideas — new hopes and ambitions. Each with a different concept of what Aramis really was. Obligingly, the transit system moved between creators and forms, attempting to appease all, but it was not possible. Before enough creative allies could attach themselves to one iteration, poor Aramis morphed again — and again and again. Aramis, it seemed, might be another kind of Bisclavret, existing in a state of perpetual transforming. It is a transit system who cannot stabilize because it is too fit for its purpose, too full of movements between.

Throughout its long, tumultuous, and unsuccessful birthing process, it was able to attract engineers and politicians, as well as financial and technological support. In the end, however, none of this resulted in a fully realized Aramis. Round and round they all went—the politicians, the engineers, the money, the ambitions, the bolts and the wheels—but the center could not hold. Aramis remained largely an idea — a story. As such, it was a source of uneasiness for those involved at various stages of the project.

How could something so promising, so needed, and so well-funded end up being scrapped after seventeen years? What went wrong? In Aramis or the Love of Technology,

Bruno Latour poses the question in a different way, assigning life to the transit system, if only retroactively, to ask: Who killed Aramis? The mourners emerge, one by one, to give their testimony, but they all seem baffled. They are a bit like the wife of Bisclavret, in bed with an intimate stranger. They thought they knew this transit system and they were wrong. Aramis, what are you? The question remains unspoken but hangs in the air, haunting, begging speculation.

Aramis’s story is not one that can be told in a linear fashion. It does not have a goal, an established ending to strive toward, and so it requires a wandering form. Latour’s book is a textual web of snippets of interviews, memos, press releases, and photos, as well as fictionalized conversations between Norbert and his intern. By setting up the investigation in this way, Latour is able to bring together many seemingly contradictory perspectives. Characters emerge, sometimes disinterested and other times quite emotional. For many, a loss has been suffered. A loved one is gone. Investigation into

Aramis’s demise is an act of mourning and catharsis as much as it is an attempt to understand. Some blame themselves. Some lament a missed opportunity; Aramis is the one that got away. Because Aramis has been unable to stand witness to its own murder, those it has left behind seek out and find human and nonhuman intermediaries with the hopes they will be able to decipher a ghostly message. They want mediums who can bring meaning, who can contact the specter and offer up to them its speculations—its strange perspective.

The premise of Latour’s book rests on this desire and he adopts the aesthetic language of film noir to confront it, casting the academic Norbert in the role of a gumshoe. It is up to him and his trusty sidekick to round up the not-so-usual suspects.

Among these are nonmaterial couplings and the variable-reluctance motor who come to the Aramis project with their own prejudices and desires, just like their human counterparts. Their stories have a surprising effect: they allow Aramis to speak. Who will have the courage to listen? Desire can bring us to strange places, entangled in plots we never expected. The strength of the genre-bending work is that it forces readers to occupy shifting and at times alien perspectives. It shares this quality with the medieval chronicle.

Latour makes up a name for his new genre: scientifiction.36 As the name suggests, it is a mixture of science and fiction. For Latour, these categories are not so different; they are both narrative spaces of possibility. This interest in admixture echoes the collective quality of the chronicles in which medieval spectral stories occur. Latour challenges the fiction/fact dichotomy. The medieval chronicle writers challenged this same binary, but through narratives about history instead of stories about science.37 The result in both cases is a parasitic genre; it inhabits the porous membrane between tradition and possibility. We are beckoned by these stories to inhabit as parasites, deceased acquaintances call, defunct technology talks.38

Aramis begins to share its own perspective on its story, not as a fully realized or realizable transportation system, but as a personality lamenting its purgatorial state. Not real enough, not fictional enough, it adds its spectral voice to this murder mystery. It refers to itself as a phantom — a fantasy. At times, it accuses its delinquent creators, charging them with not loving it enough. It is an odd indictment coming from a would-be technology and aimed at people who poured years of work and millions of francs into the project. What more could they do? Negotiate! Aramis speaks from the grave: They could have talked more, fought more, compromised more (118; 201-2). Cast as the monster, it laments: “The breath of life to which I aspire in order to make of my whitened bones a being that is not of reason — my soul — awaits your agreement … Human beings contemptuous of things and thus contemptuous of yourselves” (202). Each actor loved an idea of Aramis, an unchanging “pure” vision to which they would allow no augmentation but which also allowed little by way of alliance. The parameters were too strict and left no room for negotiation. No room to breathe. Death by ideological asphyxiation.

This desire for purity on the part of Aramis’s creators seems like love, but it is a trick; a cheap mirror illusion. It inspires passion, commitment, frustration, elation. It is erotic and seductive, but it is ungrounded, unfounded. Each sees what he reflects back to himself and stories multiply while Aramis’s reality — its ability to be realized — fades.

As Norbert, the lead investigator, explains to his frustrated intern, “[P]erfection is never inherent; it always comes at the end of the line” (121). Aramis can only be Aramis in retrospect. Aramis weakens and withers and as its health fails, so do its lovers. The allure is gone — they do not know why. They are uncomfortable and want to move on. Aramis, aging and jilted, dies in 1987.

Latour’s goal throughout the narrative is to explore networks, how they come together, create, negotiate, persist, or dissolve. Affect is key to this mission because of its ability to collect and connect others, incorporating them into one body. The wrong kind of love killed Aramis, but this does not mean that all spectralization is bad. In fact, I argue that it is necessary for existence. It is through affective attachments that bodies exist, whether they be human, bird, sheep, gold, transit system, or text. Some of Aramis’s love stories end in tragedy. These are the ones mapped by Latour. But in mapping these stories and in bringing actors together, allowing them to attach and become a narrative, another love story occurs, one that incorporates text, material, imagination, and reader — along with many other elements. Through Aramis’s emotional monologues, along with the stories gathered as evidence, the reader connects with a piece of machinery, or the idea of a piece of machinery. The reader begins to feel an attachment to a specter, which is the initiation of the metaphoric act — two becoming not one, but many.

Some will argue that describing affect in this way is a rather cheap trick, sinfully anthropomorphic. The charge isn’t an idle one, nor is it uncommon. It comes out of a concern that this type of speculative or imaginative move assumes too much and by so doing, re-inscribes human viewpoints onto nonhuman or more-than-human actors. If this is the case, anthropomorphizing is an act of silencing. It is an act of violence. This is true, however, only if we agree with the idea that affective experience is the sole property of human individuals, or perhaps animals. What if this is not the case? What if affect, like agency, is adrift? What if it is a drifting phenomenon, performative, co-implicating, and contextually emergent? What if it really is possible to love spectrally? There is in many of these stories a productive but anxious linking of affect and infection. Parasites and dainty dishes are not the only things that trouble boundaries between inside and outside; emotive connections do this too. This anxiety can be read in the stories of spectral loves—of loves between a lover who is living and one who is dead. These stories often collapse the language of disease and the language of love, a particularly potent combination when thought through medieval geohumoral theory.

Gervase of Tilbury and Walter Map, along with many of their contemporaries, wrote about love relationships that transgress the divide between the living and the dead.

In these stories, specters are capable of desiring and being desired. The urge to feel that a loved one is within reach even after death is understandable and common, but these stories do more than seek to provide comfort for the mourning. I want to suggest that they offer a model of emotive enmeshment, of affective spectrality. Such a reading aligns in many ways with geohumoral theory, a concept that enjoyed some popularity in medieval and early modern Europe. According to this theory, the human body is porous and is

shaped by the ecologies it inhabits. As such, it is open to infecting forces, physical and otherwise. Mary Floyd-Wilson explains that, “[p]eople were embedded in extended circles of shaping forces that included one’s diet, one’s family, the state, the natural environment, and the cosmological spheres” (“English Epicures and Scottish Witches”

133). Outside forces did not only impact the body, but they directly influenced emotional states as well. Even a person’s character is a result of her environment. A person can be corrupt both in body and in spirit, and in fact, in this model of embodiment, the two are not separate realms. Open to infection, they infect each other as well. In “The Fantastic

Illusion of Gerbert,” a tale in Walter Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles, the language of infection permeates the tale, challenging ideas about causality and culpability. With proximity comes vulnerability. The narrator explains that Gerbert is poisoned by the beauty of a maiden, and is transformed: “by its power [he] sank to be an ass” (351). The poisoning is metaphorical and the maiden has no motive to wish harm on Gerbert, at least not at this point in the tale, but this does not excuse her from the exchange. It is hard to overlook the misogyny in this version of their encounter, and indeed misogyny is often underwritten by ideologies that link female bodies with contamination. Not surprisingly, foreign bodies are often framed in this way as well.

This idea that environment shapes body appears with regularity in many travel narratives of the time, but as Floyd-Wilson points out, its interpretations and applications varied greatly (141). For example, Gerald of Wales is fond of attributing what he perceives to be the pervading personality traits of the Welsh and Irish peoples to their environments. In The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald explains that the Irish are treacherous and that anyone who visits the land should beware because this character

flaw is catching (book 3, section 101). It is not only that a visitor might learn treachery, but that there is something about the place itself that has the power to pass on this way of thinking and acting. Gerald does not dwell on this point because it seems obvious to him.

As is the case in this instance, this way of thinking could be used to mark peoples belonging to marginalized groups as other and justify mistreatment. But this enmeshed way of thinking human and world also had benefits. It made more visible alliances between humans and nonhumans — plants, animals, weather patterns, soil, seasons, stones, and even stars. As agentive partners, these and other members of more-than- human ecologies were sought after or shunned depending on their relative influences.

Embodied experience was understood as dependent on a vast and intimate network.

As C.N.L. Brooke notes in his introduction to the 1983 edition of M.R. James’s translation of Courtiers’ Trifles (De Nugis Curialium) one of the text’s most notable characteristics is its odd, seemingly unintelligible or unintentional organizational structure. Brooke makes several plausible hypotheses about why this is. The disordered manuscript could be the result of a clumsy scribe, or it could be that Walter Map, the author, never took the time to organize the text because he never meant to make it public in its entirety. Ultimately, however, Brooke posits that the structure fits the purpose, which itself is jumbled. He writes of the work: “It was suspended between the serious and the frivolous; it never makes up its mind which way to jump” (xlii).39 Far from a weakness of the text, this hovering on the threshold allows it to shift between perspectives and even between different traditions of knowledge-making. It is from a similar narrative space that Latour is able to conjure a transit system to speak. It is a

space inhabited by specters; the reader is not allowed to the opportunity to stop, steadying herself on terra firma, but must instead keep moving.

Courtiers’ Trifles marries seemingly contradictory systems of knowledge-making and story-telling without troubling too much over these inconsistencies. Brooke, noting

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influence on Map’s style, writes that, “He liked to tickle the fancy by putting the familiar in unfamiliar contexts,” at times sacrificing accuracy for good story-telling (xxxix). While this may offend the sensibilities of a twenty-first century reader — remember, for example, the scandal surrounding James Frey’s memoir,

A Million Little Pieces — the twelfth century reader would likely have experienced these narrative liberties differently, especially when encountered in a text that occupies a borderland between genres, as this one does (xli). Intriguingly, however, Brooke suggests that this internal incoherency may be the reason the book was never finished (xlii). Map, he adds, seems to have lost interest in his project around 1193 (xxx). The critical history of Courtiers’ Trifles seems to have inherited the fickle nature of the author; both apparently underwent long periods of disinterest (xlix). Of course, we are not afforded the luxury of asking Map or those readers and critics who may have circulated the book why it was not completed and why it did not enjoy a more stable literary position. Unlike

Norbert and his young engineer, we cannot conduct interviews to ascertain the reasonings and motives behind these actions or, rather, inactions. As Brooke is forced to conclude, we must largely rely on conjecture when attempting to map out the history of Courtiers’

Trifles. It is spectral, requiring speculation. This mode of knowledge-making, this specter-speculating, is akin to how Bruno Latour describes what he calls the phenomenon of circulating reference. He asks, “how do we pack the world into words” (24)? It is a

question Walter Map might appreciate—he refers at one point to his text as “a whole forest and timberyard” brought to the reader to make of it “dainty dishes” (209). He puts the onus on the reader, claiming to provide only the raw materials of story and prompting the reader to take these materials and make them into something pleasurable, perhaps even sustaining. The metaphor offers up many mouth-watering possibilities as it suggests a phenomenology of reading, and I will explore this in more depth a bit later in this chapter. It also works quite well as an example of Latour’s referent, a thing as uncontainable as a forest. Thankfully, Latour is not under the impression words need contain the world. One is not subject to the other. One is not even completely separate from the other. “The old settlement,” Latour writes, “started from a gap between words and the world, and then tried to construct a tiny footbridge over this chasm through a risky correspondence between what were understood as totally different ontological domains—language and nature” (Pandora’s Hope 24). He goes on to explain that these are not different domains. The act of meaning-making does not require bridges; it does not ask its participants to make associative jumps or leaps of faith, but it does demand movement—circulation. Like blood pulsing through veins, the referent-reference relationship is vital, living. But it also carries with it the scent of something from the other side, an unintentional incorporation. It is the smell of the corpor-becoming-other: death, dirt, meaning, life. Laudun could not escape it and neither can we.

This spectrality seems to have seeped into the tales Map’s text contains. This contamination is evident in the story of “the notorious Gerbert.” Who, the narrator asks, has not heard of this man (351)? The implication is of course that the reader has heard something about Gerbert. The reader comes to the story possessing some common

knowledge, but there is more to learn. If, however, the reader knows nothing of this man and his tale, the reader experiences a potential judgment — how can you be a part of this narrative community and not know this story? Either response implicates the reader, producing a desire to be pulled into or pulled further into the community of those who know. The question is an invitation. Do you want to feel as though you belong? Then you must know — or know more. The story straddles two systems of belief and is unable to finally make the two coherent. It begins in the world of romance and marvel but, by the end, has advanced to the realms of Rome and saintly miracle. It is not uncommon for these two worlds to meet; at times, they can live in harmony. Here, however, that does not seem to be the case. The narrative division occurs, fittingly enough, through a character that embodies a middle space: the spectral Meridiana. In many ways, Meridiana is a bisclavret—a becoming. For Gerbert, the main character of the story, she is the thing that facilitates transformation.

Gerbert has traveled to Reims to gain an education. He wishes to join the community of scholars there. His intent is to learn more than anyone else, and by so doing, raise himself above his peers. Initially, he seeks only the company of books. It does not take long, however, before Gerbert moves to diversify his network. He soon sees, desires, and seeks to win the favor of the daughter of the provost of Reims, “the mirror and marvel of the city” (351). This first description of the maiden includes no defining characteristic and no descriptive detail. Instead, we learn that she both reflects the city and is marveled at by it, which continually re/creates her through reflective and affective exchange. She is a mirror and a marvel only in relation to the city. It gives to her its sighs, its vows, its aspirations. She collects them onto herself as they further stabilize

her place as the most desired, most sought after woman around. In this speculative encounter, it seems the mirror does not only offer knowledge of another subject, but is itself involved in the knowledge-making process. Through the mirror metaphor

(speculum in the original Latin), the maiden is also linked to the medieval genre of speculum literature, or literature that reflects knowledge about a particular topic. What knowledge might this lady as mirror have of her city of sighs? What might it mean to marvel at a mirror? And does the mirror marvel back? What could a reflective-reflexive epistemology produce?

When Gerbert enters the community, he becomes implicated in its speculative desiring. Upon his first encounter with this much talked about maiden, Gerbert “saw, wondered, desired, and addressed” her (351). The sensory experience of sight — which follows on the heels of her aural presence through the narratives that circulate about her

— quickly blends into affective experiences. As a mirror and a marvel, this encounter evokes wonder and desire. Through his address, Gerbert extends himself in an attempt to create and stabilize a bond between himself and the maiden. Within this context, it would be quite remarkable if Gerbert’s suit was successful. At this point in the narrative, the maiden appears to be inert; her most active engagement is one of reflection, though, as we know from Latour’s circulating reference, there is great power in reflexivity, and this maiden is quite good at it; she has gathered many to her.

This story, like the Melusine-esque stories mentioned in the previous chapter, draws on the romance tradition, and in this tradition maidens are often cast as objects, which does not mean that they are deprived of agency or affect, but rather that their modes of operation are often obfuscated and more difficult to detect. As the lover,

Gerbert is the actor in the scenario, or so it seems. As I mentioned before, the maiden reflects and evokes wonder; both acts require another party — the reflected, the awed — and so it may seem that the maiden has no real agency here, but this reading shortchanges her. If the requirement of another party renders an action less powerful, then what can we make of Gerbert’s bold speech act? It too requires an audience. It also requires a shared linguistic system comprised of signs and histories of meaning, metaphoric and metonymic slide, and narrative context, not to mention the sonic vibrations and aural organs required to make and register sound. His address is so dependent, so enmeshed in the actions of others, that we may hesitate to call it “his.” While the maiden may seem to lack agency and affect of her own, this reading of Gerbert’s action casts her circumstances in a new light. Drift does not equal absence. The narrator tells us that she is “rich in the vows and aspirations of men” (351). Each sigh, each promise is another alliance, fortifying her, establishing her. Clap if you believe; she lives as adoration. But her affects are strange. Gerbert’s senses seem to be overwhelmed, unable to disentangle themselves one from another as simultaneous actions multiply and expand, culminating in an address. We are not afforded the opportunity to eavesdrop on Gerbert and the maiden. We do not know what he says, but we do know that it elicits a response. Instead of focusing on this response, the narrative attends to Gerbert as he “listen[s] and [is] entranced” (351). What manner of thing could this maiden be? Should we speculate?

Unexpected, dazzling, disorienting, Gerbert has certainly found himself a strange stranger, but he will find another stranger still.

At this point in the tale, the complex performative network within which Gerbert operates is hidden to the extent that even a communicative interaction is cast as a one-

sided affair. Gerbert gets all the screen time while the maiden is a circulating rumor. She is many things, but like Aramis, she does not stabilize into one form. Instead, she gathers allies to herself. One might notice in her situation the echo of Aramis’s plight—it is, she is, “a thing full of men, men full of things.” In this retelling—my retelling—the maiden gathers partners beyond the limits of her own story. Her allure draws others to her— conglomerates seeking conglomerates—mirror-maiden, Melusine, Bisclavret, Aramis.

What might this new thing be? How might it move and make? What stories might it tell of itself, this textual monster sewn together at the sites of its various severings—detached from a name, a family, a mantel, a coupling? No wonder Gerbert marvels. From this perspective, the more surprising thing is that he wishes to join her—or perhaps, more accurately—it, to win its love.

What happens next firmly establishes the unnamed maiden as an agentive character in the story and leaves Gerbert with a wound, a site of severing that will pull him toward another companion. When Gerbert attempts to win the maiden’s favor, he is instead rejected. In this rejection, there is an affective exchange which transforms

Gerbert. The rejection seeps into other facets of his life as friends, money, and influence fall away from him. The narrator likens Gerbert’s desire for the maiden to a man poisoned by a sorceress. He is infected by his own wanting, made weak. These are the effects of the maiden’s poison, metaphorical and no less potent for it. Gerbert’s body transforms to reflect his affective state. He sinks in stature and social standing, becoming an ass, “strong to bear burdens, impervious to blows” (351).40 As his dignity declines, so does his material wealth. The rejection casts him out of the city and out of his status as agentive male human. Like the spirit hunted by Laudun, Gerbert becomes an outcast. His

desire for intimacy pushes him outside acceptable community boundaries. He becomes an ass, a beast that can feel neither physical nor emotional pain. This pervasive numbness makes him less human. The narrator accuses Venus, goddess of love, on Gerbert’s behalf, and does so using the language of circulation. Venus gives to her soldiers wages that are

“lamentable” — implying that they both bring lament and are themselves a lament. What is more, these wages are also “fraudful” (353). Again, the meaning is double — the wages are themselves fraudulent and they are also the bringers of, or perhaps the results of, fraud. While we know from this description that Gerbert’s love story will not end happily for him, we are also asked to think of love in terms of conflict. It is an intimate transformative struggle.

The narrator tells us that Gerbert’s assets have been dispersed. He has lost his money, his land, and his belongings. Without these, he is a less substantial being. In a system of exchange, he has less to circulate. His affective deficit has resulted in an agentive shift. He exhibits alternative behaviors like stubbornness and sluggishness, while losing his sharp wit, competitive drive, and self-reliance. The narrator tells us that

Gerbert is moved from his love for the lady only by “extreme poverty” (353). Only the things necessary for survival occupy his thoughts as hunger inhabits his body. Where spurned love made him numb, the necessities of sustained embodiment — namely food

— makes him feel acutely. It is a type of feeling that his located in the body and makes him aware of his embodiment.

Affective connection, love and desire, seem to necessitate a type of mutuality. But in Gerbert’s case, that love is spurned. He becomes a spectacle, “made a show to all men” of the costs of being in love’s service. He has become a narrative device in his own

narrative; his body takes part in another type of body — a circulating story. And perhaps it is this new association that moves him beyond the city where he has lost so much. With nowhere in particular to go, he walks. As he walks, his hunger drives him to tears — emotional display but also watery association. Aqueous trans-incorporation. This overflow opens for him new possibilities. He becomes something other, a creature beside himself — multiplied and divided by grief and hunger. His feet begin to lead when his mind no longer can, and as the story goes, “step by step” he enters deep into the woods.

He has passed into a different kind of space, one that holds potential for help and harm.

It is here that Gerbert sees a woman of “unheard-of beauty” (353). He has once again entered the realm of sight, where sound does not seem quite to suffice. Her beauty marks her as unhuman — as other. Gerbert, roused to his other senses by sight-contact, experiences doubt and fear. She seems a fantasy or a phantom. Like the mirror maiden in the city, the woman in the woods is spectral — a sight, though unseen by us. She exists somewhere in between. Hoping to escape notice, to be unseen in this scene of spectrality,

Gerbert attempts to sneak away and is unsuccessful. The woodland mistress calls to him and asks that he lay aside his fears. She offers gifts; the money, neatly displayed before her, can be his. Gerbert’s altered state — weary, watery, withdrawn, nearly wholly transformed — seems to give him access to new types of alliances. What Gerbert the scholar lost in an encounter with the mirror maiden, Gerbert – now more aligned with his bestial nature—can regain through his interaction with his new amour. She offers her name, a fitting one considering the context: Meridiana.41 She is a being of the middle.

Perhaps aware that new alliances can easily be broken, Meridiana is quick to establish rules for their partnership. Gerbert can have all the wealth he desires as long as

he does not become involved again with the maiden who spurned him. Perhaps she is feeling protective, but the decree carries with it a sense of what Sara Ahmed calls the affective economy of fear.42 Gerbert’s affective entanglement is being redefined by the woman in the woods. He can, it seems, be faithful only to one. It seems to be a moot point since the maiden rejected Gerbert on their first meeting, but the woman assures

Gerbert that she will be back, regretting her decision. She will be drawn to him, desire him — and he must abstain.

Meridiana desires a different kind of relationship with Gerbert, one that breaks many of the traditional rules of romance. She asks that “he would cleave to her, not as his lady or ruler, but as an equal and friend” (353). We will see, however, that this benevolent arrangement does not hold. Equality, it seems, is not permanently durable. It would require a type of stability that neither party seems capable of preserving independently, for only a few lines later and indeed in the same speech, Meridiana proclaims her own desire to be loved and at that moment, she declares that she would be happy to be Gerbert’s handmaid, not his equal.43

This new desire marks a shift in Gerbert’s character as well as his storyline. His ambitious nature returns as he returns to the city with his new wealth. His fortune and reputation quickly rise and before long, the maiden who once spurned his advances hears stories of his success and the reverberations change her. His reversal of fortune signals a similar shift in her own situation as she begins to desire her once-spurned suitor. She expects he will renew his amorous suit and when he does not, the maiden quickly becomes the pursuer. As such, she is scorned and loses favor not only with Gerbert, but with other admirers as well. Within the romance world in which she exists as mirror and

marvel, she cannot experience success as an active pursuer, an alliance seeker. She is instead meant to be sought. She takes on the traditional role of an object which, as I argued above, does not mean that she is deprived of agency, but rather that she is expected to exercise a particular type of unseen power. She should be the source of allure, drawing others to her through her beauty and circulated reputation. She is not meant to be the one who is moved.

Like Gerbert after his failed attempts at wooing, she is transformed by her mirrored failure. Since the moment of their meeting, they each seem destined to act as the other’s double – one achieves success at the cost of the other. Her affective and agentive shift is marked in the narrative by a shift in description. She takes on animalistic characteristics. Transformed through metaphor into a horse or ass, she “seized the bit, and caring not whither the rein turned or pulled her back, obeyed full tilt the spurs that were plunged into her flank” (359). A beast of burden, she experiences a similar numbing sensation. In this state, she too meets an old woman who “arouses [the maiden] as one raised from the dead” (359). Like Meridiana, she becomes a medium through which the maiden is able to fulfill her desire, arousing her from a state of stasis into one of action.

The maiden finds Gerbert asleep in the woods and overtakes him, effectively raping him before he becomes fully aware of what has happened. Until this point, she has only mirrored Gerbert’s failure and transformation. Here, however, in her new role as one returned from the grave’s edge, she oversteps the actions of her counterpart, becoming in her insistent solicitation more akin to the ghost who haunted William Laudun.

Upon realizing that he has inadvertently broken faith with Meridiana, Gerbert seeks her out. The narrative makes it quite clear that Gerbert was not fully aware of what

was happening during the sexual encounter with the maiden, that she intentionally took advantage of his drowsy and drunken state, but in the world of the story, this does not excuse him from responsibility. He is held accountable for the results of the encounter even though his intentions did not align with his actions. A variety of components share agency: “the heats of youth and of the hour, of food and of wine all conspired to induce love” (359). Intimate contact adds culpability to agentive drift—implicating all involved.

But these other agents are not made to seek reconciliation after the encounter. They have broken no faiths. Or perhaps they have and those aspects of their stories are not captured here. To us, they seem complicit. In light of what happens, perhaps they are even conspiratorial, sustaining conditions that enable Gerbert’s rape. What we are left with is unsettling. The only character in the tale to whom Gerbert has pledged loyalty is

Meridiana, and although he does not mean to break faith, the transgression done against him is something he must atone for. Intimate encounters are not always kind to those involved. They are not fair. As Morton points out, these transformative engagements are not cute.

Gerbert’s story is titled “De fantastica decepcione Gerberti” — the fantastic deception of Gerbert. M.R. James translates it “Of the Fantastic Illusion of Gerbert” (350-

351). It is not like some of the other stories about supernatural encounters in Courtiers’

Trifles; the title is less ambiguous in respect to the nature of the encounter. What is less clear, however, is what elements or characters are deceptions. In this tale of middles, mirrors, and morphings—what is the illusion? It is tempting to read Meridiana as a fantasy figure, but the narrative deprives us of this easy answer. There is no hint in the tale that she is less real than Gerbert or the maiden. Perhaps the deception refers to

Gerbert’s initial attraction to the marvelous mirror maiden who becomes a source of strife and violence, but she too seems quite substantial. She takes advantage of Gerbert, but she does not deceive him. It is problematic to apply these descriptors—illusion, deception— to a particular character and so they must pertain to something else. Perhaps they refer not to a person or thing at all, but to a mode of encounter. If Meridiana is, as her name suggestions, a middle—if she is a type of embodied becoming with the power to transform those with whom she comes into contact—then perhaps she requires a becoming mode of engagement. The rules change around her. She requires of her companions the ability to hold reality and illusion together. They are not opposites, not at war with one another, but rather provide a necessary friction. A sensual contact. To think this way is to embrace what might be called madness. One must embrace divergent realities as co-generative. Consider how madness is treated in the tale. It is only after

Gerbert starts to lose touch with his ability to make meaning that he meets Meridiana.

She requires a different kind of meaning-making. The maiden experiences a similar encounter with an enchantress. At this point in the tale, the maiden has lost so much of her sense that she is nearly dead; she is semi-spectral. It is only in this state that she can come into contact with the woman in the wood who transforms her.

In this story, attraction, affective suspension, and madness are intertwined. They facilitate alternative perspectives; they spectralize realities. Gerbert “imbibe[s] madness” as he listens to the maiden. Hearing and ingesting are collapsed into one co-implicating encounter.44 He takes in the transformative poison, and with it, a new goal.

Unsuccessfully, he attempts to win the lady’s affections and when it is clear to him that his case is hopeless, he is overcome by another all-consuming emotion — despair. “[H]e

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fell,” the narrator explains, “from his peace of mind” (353). Gerbert is not the only character who is impacted by this affective catatonia. Like an infection, it spreads through his other encounters. His lands dwindle, as does his fortune. Servants and even friends leave him until he finds himself alone. “[H]is substance was wholly dispersed”

(353). The things which had made him recognizable to others as Gerbert have left him.

Each bond amputated until he, as he existed before, is no more. At this point, in poverty,

Gerbert is able to disentangle himself from the allure of the maiden who has for the entirety of the story been hidden from the reader’s view. The story follows a common romance plot: a man loves a lady who remains out of reach. He wastes away, dwindling in wealth, body, and mind. It is easy to look past the vast networks involved in such descriptions. This type of narrative seems obsessively reflective, folding back on itself with no way to move beyond the bereft. But if the reader questions the simplicity of this encounter, a myriad of other attachments begin to take shape. Gerbert has property. Of course, this is a statement of ownership, but it is also a statement of co-dependence on more-than-human relationships. As much as humans may wish to make claims of possession, it is clear the moment nonhuman others begin to drop away that the relationship was not that simple. Julian Yates uses the term “prosthetic” to describe material allies humans come to rely on. His choice of term highlights the porous boundary between humans and nonhumans, and even between human bodies and the material with which they interact (Error Misuse Failure: Object Lessons from the English

Renaissance 20). Gerbert’s declining state attests to this extensive need for human and well as nonhuman alliances. His emotional turmoil has very real consequences on the

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land, on his ability to subsist, and on human relationships that are at least partially built upon that human-land partnership.

It is reductive to say that the land becomes melancholic by way of an extension of

Gerbert’s own affective state. This would be a dangerous anthropomorphic move because it imagines a land — already a word that erases and assumes too much — that relies on human perspective, human interpretation, and human intervention for its own expression.

It would mean that the land exists primarily for, and as a result of, human attention.

Instead, I see something much more generative and expansive taking place in this affective encounter. The non-human others with whose lives Gerbert’s own subsistence is intertwined impact each other on a variety of levels. This becomes a bit more obvious as the story progresses and a fairy-like love interest enters the scene. Meridiana seems to be so intimately linked with nature that it is difficult to extract one from the other. She works like an extension or a representation, though this type of reading would also quickly lead to a reductive description of a complex enmeshment. She is instead something like an affective mediator, appearing on the scene — or rather, luring the story to herself — at the time to Gerbert and the lands upon which he depends have begun to weaken and dwindle. The affective state and corresponding physical transformations are diffusive, spread and shared throughout. They do not belong to one character, human or not. Instead, we get a model of affective drift that marries Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect economies to medieval geohumoral theory, where emotive response circulates within a wide ecology of human and nonhuman actors. In “Affective Economies” Ahmed argues for what she calls an economic model of affect in which emotions circulate among a group, working to bind members of that group together (119). She explains that this

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model of affect allows us to consider emotions “as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive value” (120). In other words, emotions are not the property of the individual but rather exist in a shared and shifting space, a network of emotive others. “Affect,” she writes, “does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs” (120).

Gerbert pledges himself not only to Meridiana, but to the Christian church. In part due to the wealth and reputation he gains as Meridiana’s partner, Gerbert eventually occupies the most holy office of pope. His access to these two worlds has the effect that he cannot partake in holy communion (361). Like Melusine and her counterparts, his spectrality — his ability to circulate in between — has the strange effect that he is unable to imbibe the transubstantive host. The narrator tells us that “During the whole course of his priesthood, when the sacrament of the Lord’s body and blood was celebrated he never tasted it, either in fear or respect, but by the most wary concealment feigned the act which he did not perform” (361). As another intimate encounter, holy communion is a site of resistance for Gerbert. Perhaps he is too close to another transubstantive figure, too adrift in her modes of relationship to be able to abide another mingling body. Perhaps we see in

Gerbert’s tale an example of the limits of affective drift. As metaphorism, as connection, affect is multitudinous, multi-directional, and vast, but it is not entirely boundless. If it were, meaning would be lost. Connection would be lost. If our goal in approaching narrative in ways that open up perspectival possibilities is to acknowledge the more-than- humanness of the human, we may find in Gerbert a transportive metaphor—an Aramis, a bisclavret, a Meridiana, a Melusine—inviting some intimacies and resisting others.

Ultimately, Gerbert was made to answer for his competing loyalties. Meridiana foresaw

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his reckoning and told him of how he would be confronted by his love for her and his duties as the leader of the Catholic Church. He sought to avoid conflict and assumed that if he knew enough about the circumstances in which Meridiana saw his reckoning, he could escape it, but by accident he found himself inhabiting the moment his spectral lover had described. Recognition prompted confession and death followed soon after. His sin was that he could not take communion—or rather, this was the symptom of his larger sin, intimacy with the strange stranger, the dweller in the borderlands. As pope, he had been able to hide his aversion during the communion ceremony because there was a border— an altar—between himself and the church. As he confessed, he called for the border to be removed, forever changing ecclesiastical tradition. It is a request that strangely echoes the cries of Laudun’s neighbor, an insistent border transgressor—the spectral solicitor, animated and dead through obscured means and meanings. Why is he able to walk among the living? Is he not kin to the Holy Ghost?

These tales of affective attachment are sensual, but not always consensual. Touch lingers and transforms. To be touched means one might become disoriented, unmoored from pasts and possible futures; imbibing, consuming, mingling. Brace for parasitic contact.

***

Phenomenology of transrelation

It is expedient for the instruction of us all that no one should live with closed eyes or ears, or with any sense inactive; he ought to be edified inwardly by outward things. By them, as we are blind to the future, some parts of the present are made plain and some of the past. Let us make speed to perceive what we did not see ourselves; what we did not hear, let us not scoff at, but submitting the future to God, let us hasten to be taught by the things which the Lord has set before us to imitate or avoid …

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Walter Map, Courtiers’ Trifles, “Prologue” of fourth distinction

[T]iny causes sometimes have more effects than perceptible ones. What to say, then, about testimony, observation, experience? What are hearing, sight, good sense worth? What do our histories, blind, say that is true? Michel Serres, Biogea, “Flora and Fauna”

C.N.L. Brooke posits that the prologue to the fourth distinction of Courtiers’ Trifles was intended to work as the prologue to the entire work. Its current placement is one of the many organizational mysteries of the text (xxvii-xxix). If we follow the advice of Brooke and treat this prologue as the intended introduction to the complete text, a distinctly phenomenological reading practice is suggested for the book. According to Map, a reader should allow herself to take in through her faculties of sight and sound the instruction that is about to be offered her. Through these exchanges, those things outside will be incorporated into the reader and because of this, the reader is advised to be careful about the sensory exchanges in which she takes part. Some will have edifying influences, but others may impact the unwary seer or hearer in evil ways. Far from being a spectator, the reader is an active participant in the stories she encounters; she is transformed by them as she takes them into herself via sensual exchange. What is more, this sensual exchange between self and other, text and reader, is how we learn. It is how, according to Map, the

Christian God chooses to make knowledge available to living things, particularly humans. However, this knowledge does not simply flow into us from the world beyond or from a piece of writing. It requires interpretation, an exchange of meaning—a mediation—a transrelation, by which I mean a relation between. Senses are the mediators.

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Humans know their world through sensual contact—how something tastes, feels, looks, sounds, smells—but Graham Harman argues that sensual contact is not the property of humans alone. It is not even exclusive to sentient creatures. Instead, all objects encounter each other through sensual exchange (Prince of Networks 201). It is this concept of sensuality that Ian Bogost builds upon when he writes about metaphorisms. For both Harman and Bogost, contact happens within a zone of translation—the essence of each object is not touched, not transformed in any way, but its sensual nature is translated by other objects via shared properties. Thus, it is through these encounters of translation that meaning resides. Speculation, then, as sensual encounter, is a type of truth. It is a legitimate mode of knowing.

Map is particularly aware of this aspect of stories and it is something which he feels compelled to remind the reader. As I noted earlier in this chapter, he returns to the theme in the conclusion to the second distinction, writing “I set before you here a whole forest and timberyard … I am but your huntsman. I bring you the game, it is for you to make dainty dishes of it” (209). In this passage, he connects reading with eating; they both involve the consumption and integration of substance—material and intellectual.

They also challenge the idea that there is a stable “outside” which is excluded from entering an “inside”—in this case, “inside” would mean the psyche and the stomach. In this metaphoric equation, neither of these “insides” retain integrity, and in fact by linking reading to eating, Map suggests that the reader, like the diner on “dainty dishes,” needs this corpus, this undressed spoil of the hunt, to survive. It is a means of essential sustenance.

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The image calls us back to Morton’s mesh of strange strangers—intimate, penetrating, and yet vast and dislocating. In so doing, he brings into play the sense of taste. It is a common enough association—consider the phrase “she has developed a taste for horror stories.” We often overlook the work this metaphor accomplishes, linking phenomenological encounter with affective experience. A touch to the tongue becomes a preference for things that do not enter through the mouth. Especially as it is associated with a reading practice, taste seems abstract. As Holly Dugan and Lara Farina argue, however, the “intimate” senses of smell and taste are often overlooked or reread via visual association, reducing the reading body to eyes alone (“Intimate senses / sensing intimacy”). But sensuality resists such quarantines. Sensation, as Michel Serres argues, is not as local as we think, not as precise and exacting. Rather, it is a mode of mingling, more dispersive than definitive; not inclined to compartmentalization.

The quote at the beginning of this section, taken from Michel Serres’s “Flora and

Fauna” chapter in Biogea, hints at the sensate world beyond the human, acknowledging the transubstantial nature of creative and destructive encounter. As an author so deeply entangled in his own phenomenological experiences—as a sailor on a storm-tossed sea and a climber in the uncompassionate arctic—the vastness of the world can never be fully apprehended through human sensuality. Apprehended at times through the emotion it evokes—trepidation, horror, or love—Serres considers a “ropemate friend” vibrating in a wind that evokes human speech while, at the same time, overextending it. Meaning is made, then, in the contact. And this meaning, exuberant in its categorical defiance, is humbling. There is a whole world of knowing that is not human; symphonies upon symphonies to which we are utterly deaf. But what is sensual contact if it is not mediated

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through the human organ? His answer seems to be akin to Latour’s—sensuality is struggle, transforming contact, whether or not it is readily registered and interpreted through normative modes of human sensory encounter.

Tellingly, Serres’s meditation begins with a story—several stories—about a ghost ship. A ghost ship as he uses the term does not refer to a ship inhabited by human ghosts.

Rather, it is a ship that has been taken over by nonhumans—by those members of a sea- ship ecology that are disinterested in anthropocentric experience. Ghost ships do not contain human spirits; rather, they are spirited by carnivorous, ravenous rats. They are floating buffets upon which human flesh constitutes the main course. It is their howl, related to Serres by other sailors, upon which the first chords of the meditation are played. Inhuman. Anti-human. These creatures scratch and screech their way to carnage, eating into the nightmares of sailors like Serres. Once one hears the cry, it cannot be forgotten, though that cry is entirely uninterested in human understanding. It pulsates from a place in which hunger, embodied pain, blurs the food chain. Meat is meat— human or not.

Ghost ships are not just for the decayed and the carnivorous. They carry with them microbic phantom-makers. Upon the backs of fleas rides the true devastation, responsible, as Serres notes, for many more deaths than any human war or rodent hoard.

Invisible. Silent. Sensible to the host only, always known too late. What of Map’s righteous warning then? Can we learn to see all? Hear all? Sense every member of an ecological self? Can we know who lives in us—as us? No. Ghost ships are ghost selves, inhabited by what defines and defies, constitutes and ingests. As the subtitle to The Five

Senses makes clear, sensation “mingle[s] bodies,” not only mixing other with self, but

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making impossible embodied compartmentalization. Map’s allusion to the sensual here does not end with taste, but rather expands beyond the human body, incorporating flora and fauna. This intimate link between text and matter, story and vital substance, loses some of its impact when encountered in a hardcover book such as the one I have before me. It is mass produced, exuding little sensual appeal aside from the faint smell of oranges it has acquired as a result of my habit of eating them while writing. Encased in glossy ochre cardboard and heavy for a book that has so often occupied a bag slung over my shoulder, I am rarely acutely aware of the aesthetics of the corpus and even less so of its composite materials which once existed in very different forms, transformed. A medieval reader, however, would have experienced this metaphor quite differently. The forest—wood and game—are intimate cohorts with ink and idea. Words on skin incorporate small hairs at intervals, hints of a past life. A stitch visible here, a scar there.

The wood of the boards that form the covers of the book are weighty reminders of labor, place, financial and ecological cost. Map’s sensual insistences encourage us to consider the multi-species writing machines with which we interact not only as makers and tellers of story, but as participants in sensual encounters—phenomenological cominglings that transform us as we translate them.45 We might consider how the timbre of the pseudo- tongue facilitates a different kind of sensual confrontation between reader and story as the linguistic encounter necessitates a more phenomenological reading practice.

Translation is never a passive act and it defies essentializing singularities. I want to suggest that in this way, language itself acts as a sense. It is not, as Serres argues, a thing that numbs sensuality. Rather, it is phenomenological encounter.

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At this point, I want to take a moment to revisit Elidyr, the sentimental priest in

Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland. I considered Elidyr’s story at some length in the previous chapter, though there I did not dwell on the linguistic implications of the tale. As you may recall, old Elidyr recounts for Gerald a story of his youth. For a brief and happy period, he could freely travel between the human and fairy worlds. He did so through a variety of secret passageways that seemed to appear and disappear at will.

Elidyr describes a place other—luminescent, idyllic, mysterious. It was lavishly sensual, capricious in its allure. As a young boy, Elidyr valued his access to this realm because of the freedom it afforded him. He used it to escape rigid scholastic conditions and the punishments and disciplines that accompanied them. His motives were childish. His mother, however, valued a different type of freedom in the form of financial stability and the increased social agency that accompanies it.46 In the story, this desire is not so innocent and it leads to Elidyr’s expulsion from the fairy realm. While recounting the tale as an old man, Elidyr expresses a deeply felt loss, but he does not relate this deprivation in terms of abandoned companions or even vanished landscape and experience. Instead, he laments the loss of a language. It seems that for him, every other felt fatality—every friend, every magical afternoon, every hospitality and child game—are present in this one overarching casualty. With language goes relationship and an ability to fully recall to mind experience. This is what torments him in his old age. One can almost feel his heart sink as he tries to mouth words that have left him jilted. Elidyr is aware that language does not dull the senses, as Serres suggests, but rather it is part and parcel with them.

Jonathan Hsy, writing about The Wake, a work of contemporary fiction in which the author adopts a prose style meant to evoke old English, observes that the work makes the

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claim that “vanished tongue[s]” may be the only appropriate way to contemplate “the historical and cultural consequences of ecological change” (“Language Ecologies: Ethics,

Communities, and Digital Affect” 378). One might imagine Elidyr attempting a similar project in an effort to reconnect with that other place and those other peoples. The twin labor and lament—belonging to the author of The Wake and Elidyr respectively—speak to the power of translation and indeed of language itself. In both instances, language does not cut people off from deep ecological engagement, but rather works as one more entangling tendril—vital, touching. For Elidyr, it is a spectral tongue that hovers just beyond reach, reminding, transporting. If, as I have been suggesting, we are to think of the spectral in posthuman terms, as incorporating human and nonhuman, then it is important to consider what it might mean to think not just in terms of sight—or of the anthropocentric five sense model—but rather of sensing, of phenomenology—or knowing through experience—in posthuman terms.

In the story of wild Eadric, another of Walter Map’s trifles, sight moves. It entices, lures, connects, witnesses and convinces. Wild Eadric is so called because of “his bodily activity, and his rollicking talk and deeds” (155). He is a very physical creature, associated with action, linguistic and material. He is a lord and as such, he is also a hunter. He takes life to sustain his own, always implicated in the energy of a nonhuman other. He is enmeshed in a context of nonhuman others that are nevertheless like himself—wild. It is in this context, as Eadric walks “through the wild country” after a day of hunting, that he comes across something quite fantastic—phantasmic. At first, he plays the role of a spectator, seeing but unseen. He sees a gathering of what looks like

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noble ladies. They dance. They are beautiful. They wear only linen. Exotic and erotic, he finds them enticing (155).

He sees the enchanting women and can think of nothing but possessing the most resplendent among them. He is driven by desire, hooked through his eyes. The initial moment of discovery and attraction is fire-like, wound-inflicting, and feverishly infectious. It is as if Eadric has no choice; he has been possessed. He is emblazoned, injured, infected—overcome by this stranger, this consuming other. And as he is consumed, his desire is to consummate, to take into himself that which he wishes to hold as his, becoming, in a moment of intimacy, whole. This is the dream of desire, though it proves to be as phantasmic as his beloved. It is through sight that he has been drawn and this visual allure deadens his other senses. “He had heard tell,” writes Map, “of the fables of the heathen, the nightly squadrons of devils and the deadly visions of them, […] had learnt of the vengeance of the gods when offended, and how they inflict sudden punishment on those who suddenly catch sight of them […] those vengeances and the examples of the sufferers he had heard” but he remembers none of this (157). These verbal warnings, these recited lessons, drop away as Eadric beholds the beauty before him. The narrator observes that Cupid is often represented as blind, but it seems that what this wild hunter lost is his hearing, and with it, his connection to a narrative tradition filled with cautionary tales about apparitional encounters just like the one in which he hopes to engage.

Eadric rushes for his prey, catching her amid her companions. Struggle ensues, but she is pulled away—separated and taken. Like the unnamed mirror maiden in the tale of Gerbert, this maiden seems to be—or become—aligned with the animalistic. She is

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hunted and caught in the wild country. While she may look like a noble lady, her location and Eadric’s tactics clearly mark her as something other.

Eadric does not escape the encounter unmarked. Her sisters scratch and bite as their loved one is taken from them. Their modes of attack and defense again align the women with animals who might use their claws and teeth to fend off a predator, and indeed Eadric is predatory in this exchange. He absconds with the woman and “for three days and nights used her as he could” (157). The implication is that he rapes her and possibly subjects her to other types of violence. During these three days and nights, the woman would not speak. He could not provoke her to respond in this way. This was one sensual exchange she could control, denying him the touch of language. She proved no match for his strength, but she did not bend entirely to his will, transforming a physical fight into a linguistic one. And, indeed, when she finally chooses to speak, she seems to have the upper hand. Her first utterance is performative, full of agency—it is a blessing and a curse. She promises him “prosperity in body and affairs” until the day that he rebukes her with her sisters or her woods. Essentially, he cannot use the context in which he found her against her. On that day, she warns, he will suffer many losses and continue to do so until his last day. She tells him that he will know he has brought his ruin upon himself. Eager Eadric emphatically agrees. He seems unaware of the risks of intimacy.

He is not wholly his own.

The story progresses as one might expect. There are years of peace and prosperity until Eadric performs the action that prompts the curse. The woman vanishes and

Eadric’s fortune dwindles. He laments his losses and weakens, at last dying in sorrow.

Map has chosen to firmly root the tale of wild Eadric in a historic context. Eadric is in

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fact an historical figure; he was an Anglo-Saxon thegn who lived in the eleventh century.

He briefly led an unsuccessful revolt against King William but was reconciled to the monarch and the attempt appears not to have cost him any great losses. In fact, King

William is mentioned in Map’s tale in quite an interesting way, as a type of proof. Not only does his part in the story bolster it by adding historical context, but in the tale the king himself seems to be quite taken with the idea of proving the validity of the woman’s fairy nature. After news of Eadric’s otherworldly bride spreads to the court, the king requests the couple visit him so he can witness the woman for himself. She enters the court as spectacle, as wonder. But it is not only through sight that the lady is proven. The tale of her beauty has circulated, spreading through the court. It has traveled before her, much like the tales of the maiden who mirrors the loves of her city. The king is touched first by fantasy and it is through this touch that she begins to become real to him. He doubts until he sees, but in doubt there is speculation. Spec—the act of seeing, though it is an imagined seeing—circulates, moves, and begins to bring together. In this way, the act of speculating is the seed of sensual intimacy.

The tale appears under the heading “Again of Such Apparitions,” as one in a litany of narratives in which the natures of such beings and encounters are questioned. In the story of Eadric and his beloved apparition, sight seems to be the prominent mode of verification, though that sight must be registered by the king to be adequate proof. Even after she is substantiated in the world of the story, the reader knows she is an apparition, a label that confirms as much as it obscures. In other tales in this litany, various other modes of phenomenological knowing are used, sometimes resulting in satisfactory evidentiary substantiation and other times generating wonder, questions, and doubt.

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There is one piece of information that sets Eadric’s lady apart from many others; she has a son with her human lover. Their relationship, their story—whatever its nature— produces life. Tim Ingold argues in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and

Description that stories are the very stuff of life. They are the mesh by which, through which, we know and move and live. For Ingold, the whole world is storied. We do not move, we do not see or know or feel, without story – without, to some extent, fantasy. He calls this entirely storied world the “meshwork” in which, like Ariadne’s web, the world is made of “interwoven threads” (xii). In the meshwork, story is contact; story is sensual.

It is both a mode of connection and a thing in itself, connected, sensing. It is not beholden to human language, touch, or knowing. This is a point of distinction he makes between

“story” and “narrative.” Ingold argues that while the act of storying is performative and emergent—it requires movement, and in fact is movement, narrative is about systems of classification. He writes that “stories always, and inevitably, draw together what classifications split apart” (160, italics in original). But he quickly acknowledges that storying and narrating are not entirely separate activities. Telling a story—putting contact-event into words—is narration (161). Ingold’s description of story-as-contact echoes Harman’s claim that all things experience other things through their properties.

Unlike Harman, however, Ingold sees these experiences as fully relational. Things are their encounters, which means that thing-properties—what makes them what they are— are always “processual and relational” and that, “In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix, and mutate” (30). Narrative is sensual and to sense is to story. There is no choice not to tell in the mesh, and though that telling might not be in

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the form of human language, it is no less a shared intimacy for that lack. Perhaps we will realize that the nonhuman world is too caught up in its own intimacies to notice what manner of stranger a human is. Is a human more or less strange to a petal than to a pen?

They share their own phenomenological transrelation. But that does not mean we should stop listening to the calls of the specter; it does not mean we should stop speculating, reaching out, touching, telling, becoming. Hear the invitations to intimacies not always wanted. Which ones will you pursue? Which will you reject? Do you think you can choose?

24 Map gives the name of an English knight, William Laudun, who is attached to this tale. As if to validate the story, Map gives a short history of Laudun, noting that at the time of the incident, he lived in Wales and was bishop of Hereford. As Map records the story, however, Laudun resides in London. Interestingly, this was not enough information for the editors of the Oxford Medieval Texts edition of Courtiers’ Trifles to identify an historical person who fits this description. Nonetheless, it seems important to Map to establish that Laudun is in fact a real person and that, by extension, the story concerning him is trustworthy (202-203). 25 In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue that things always exist in a state of becoming, writing that, “What is real is the becoming itself, the bock of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes” (238). In my use of becoming, I mean to evoke their meaning for the term. 26 I find Timothy Morton’s explanation of ecology particularly helpful: “Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence” (The Ecological Thought 4). 27 In “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out that hybridity is often connected with monstrosity in tales of the “medieval occidental imaginary.” I suggest that something similar might be happening in tales that blur cultural distinctions between man and animal. I find Cohen’s description of how the term “monster” is mobilized in these tales particular productive. He explains that it can have a double meaning: “’that which warns’ (monere) and ‘that which reveals’ (demonstrare)” (85). Bisclavret’s hybrid nature seems to match this description. He reveals that the distinction between human and nonhuman is always tenuous and his experiences arguably serve as an interesting warning about what can happen when this tenuousness is too easily dismissed. 28 For all references to the tale of “Bisclavret,” I use The Lias of Marie de France, translated by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. Original copyright 1978, reprinted in the United States of America in 2008, by Labyrinth Press. 29 I use “bisclavret” to refer to the werewolf-like creature and “Bisclavret” to refer to the character by that name. 30 It is worth noting that some recent scholarship has approached this tale from a very different perspective. Leila K. Norako sees in Bisclavret a story about how the ideals of courtly love can be and are used to justify violence against women. She uses her insightful reading of the medieval tale to think critically about how remnants of the courtly love culture still impact our current ideas

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about romance, as well as our perceptions of what it should mean to be a man or a woman within a romantic context. See her post “On Courtly Love and Toxic Masculinity,” In the Middle, posted March 2, 2018. 31 See chapter one, “Spectral Bodies,” for the story of Melusine. She is a character that appears in several medieval romances and is most often a beautiful woman who, behind closed doors, has the ability to transform into a dragon. 32 In Error Misuse Failure, Julian Yates uses the term specter to designate that which is meant to be hidden but does not remain hidden (80). I appreciate Yates’s usage and mean to echo it here. Sacredness is about secrecy and so, in my use of the term, I mean to evoke this sense of something hidden to which Yates refers. It is, however, central to my theory of spectrality that specter does not mean one thing or one mode of being. The term, like the beings it describes, fails to stay in focus, shifting with the lights and shadows of each meaning-making encounter. 33 In his description of relationship within the mesh, Timothy Morton explains the paradox of borders. We need the ideas of “inside” and “outside” to make the concept of relationship thinkable, and yet if everything is completely dependent, there can be no impermeable border. Morton uses two primary examples to make his point – the relationship between parasite and host, and the relationship between language and meaning. He points to parasite-host symbiosis to explain border permeability and then juxtaposes that to linguistic systems that rely on difference to create meaning. These contradictory models mirror what it is like to exist in the mesh (The Ecological Thought 39). This is a paradox Morton does not try to solve. To solve would be to simplify, and we would lose too much. I am suggesting Laudun experiences a similar paradoxical border encounter. He attempts to solidify a boundary in order to maintain a difference between the living and the dead and, at the same time, experiences a haunter-haunted symbiosis of sorts. 34 In the chapter titled “The Historiographical Operation,” found in Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History, de Certeau makes the claim that the making of history is a practice; it is something that requires continual work in order to remain (seem) stable. This means that what we call “history” is always on tenuous footing, shifting in practice. What I find particularly productive here is de Certeau’s discussion of how this practice is inextricably linked with both life and death. The past—the dead—are used by the living to make (practice) a narrative of history that then informs the practice of living in the present. Importantly, de Certeau links narrative with knowledge-making via structures of power so that narrative is always and classification and is always informed by and enforcing a political agenda. Those who narrate history, then, are entwined in these agendas and systems of classification. The unquiet spirit that haunts Laudun and his neighbors occupies the role of the historian, using his own dead body to enforce a present-shaping narrative. 35 See Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery F. Gordon for a particularly compelling study of how the spectral operates within repressive regimes of power. 36 Scientifiction is a hybrid genre Latour has created. He found this new format necessary because he wanted to “come close enough to reality so that scientific worlds could become once again what they had been: possible worlds in conflict that move and shape one another” (ix). The format proves crucial to his message in Aramis or the Love of Technology because it allows for an exploration of how a large variety of actors — some that would not likely be considered in either a purely scientific or a purely fictional text — come together to continually influence and shape one another. 37 In his exploration of how history writing works, Michel de Certeau uses language that is very similar to the language Latour uses when describing circulating reference in science fields. Certeau writes of the “circulation of concepts … the movements which throughout the century had transported philosophical categories into the underground of history” (The Writing of History 58-59). 38 I am drawing on Michel Serres’s use of the term “parasite”—something that is next to and food, consumable. Interestingly, Serres links this notion of “parasite” to sound: “the noise of the 117

world, the sounds of birth and transformations” (The Parasite 38). Sound, like the parasite, is a mediator—a connecting/touching alongside—changing what it ingests (incorporates). 39 Some of this indecisiveness has to do with where and when it was written. In King Henry II’s court, of which Map was a member, the romance tradition was an important aspect of the culture (xxiii). While romances share some characteristics that make them identifiable members of the genre, it is a narrative mode that is noted for its ability to incorporate a wide range of style and belief systems, often without marking distinctions that in other contexts might read as contradictory. This has become part of the allure of the genre; its conglomerative nature has resulted in an impressively enduring type of story-telling. 40 While the narrator seems to imply that Gerbert is only ass-like and does not undergo some magical transformation, there is a degree of ambiguity surrounding the metaphor. How much has Gerbert really changed? Might someone mistake him for a beast of burden? An allusion to Morpheus, which seems to refer to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses suggests that he does indeed undergo some type of physical noticeable change (351, footnote 3). 41 M.R. James suggests that the name may be Marianna, as does a marginal note in the Latin manuscript, but I am choosing to use the original for the metaphorical alliances it offers. 42 In “Affective Economies” Ahmed argues for what she calls an economic model of affect in which emotions circulate among a group, working to bind members of that group together (119). She explains that this model of affect allows us to consider emotions “as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive value” (120). In other words, emotions are not the property of the individual but rather exist in a shared and shifting space, a network of emotive others. “Affect,” she writes, “does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs” (120). 43 This exchange is reminiscent of the vows made between Dorigen and Arveragus in the beginning of Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale.” A parody of the romance genre, Chaucer has his lovers make vows of equality that immediately crumble as they acknowledge their own positions in their prescribed romance roles – loved and beloved. This exchange highlights the paradoxical nature of chivalric love. In Meridiana’s case, however, the contradiction seems to be less intentional. 44 “Co-implicated” is a term Lowell Duckert coined and I find very helpful here. He uses it to highlight the complexities of connection, everything is implicated in everything else: “Hello, everything—we’re co-implicated.” See Duckert’s post “It’s Co-Implicated, AVMEO: Drifting with John Muir, Speaking Stones, and a Slower (Non)humanities.” George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute blog, posted Friday, March 18, 2011. 45 I take the term “multi-species writing machine” from “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression,” by Julian Yates, in Animal Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. 46 See chapter one for the story of Elidyr. Upon realizing that gold is a very common material with little worth attached to it in the fairy otherworld, Elidyr’s mother asks her son to bring her an object of gold. Presumably, she assumes it will not be missed. Elidyr agrees and brings her a small golden ball, a toy he plays with in the otherworld. In so doing, Elidyr breaks a rule—no object from the fairy otherworld should be taken into the non-fairy world—and is banished for his transgression.

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Chapter Three: Spectral Ecologies

It is futile to seek a pure nature unpolluted by humanity, and it is foolish to define the self as something purely human. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

Ecology is about relating not to Nature but to aliens and ghosts. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

Against the advice of our leader, our fear of the unusual surface made us hurry across the quicksands, for terror gave us wings. Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales

Imagine yourself in a crowded metro or subway car at rush hour, elbow to elbow, you and your fellow passengers breaking social conventions concerning personal space by default. You forgive the unexpected sharp jab delivered by the briefcase as the car jumps into action after a brief stop in which even more people shove their way into the tight space. Everyone has the same goal. Everyone has somewhere to be and this is how we all must get there. Our similarities—shared circumstances and needs—facilitate understanding. We are most likely to forgive minor injustices when we feel a comradery toward those who commit them. Now imagine that you are packed into that same car, elbow to elbow—but without destination, without shared purpose. Jolted, jostled, cramped, you look around and see not other people, but a crowding of Kafka-esque metamorphs. It is a suitable nightmare for anyone who relies on public transportation. We want to feel we have some say concerning with whom we share such intimacies. Such a nightmare belies our fear—our knowledge—that we do not. You are unlikely to yell at the holder of the briefcase who has done you minor injury. But what would you do in that other car with those other things? Do you scream? Do you hit? Do you kick? Do you attempt to escape?

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In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton makes the interesting claim that thinking ecologically—or intentionally inhabiting ecological enmeshments—requires one to relate to aliens and ghosts. He is uninterested in the human ability to sympathize with fellow human travelers—with those we understand. For Morton, this will not get us very far. To think ecologically, we cannot rely on the comforts of familiarity. Rather, we should cultivate a perspective that recognizes enmeshments in ecologies of shared affective and phenomenological being. Relationship is spectralizing; to live with and as enmeshments of aliens and ghosts, we become that strange other. In chapter two, I introduced the idea of spectral intimacy—affective and phenomenological connections that disperse agency and even identity. In this chapter, I take that perspective a step further and apply it to ecological enmeshment at large. This allows a thinking through and alongside narratives—especially narratives about colonial cohabitations—that holds open potential interpretations and possible alliances. It also, however, highlights the vitality of conflict. Enmeshments are not always loving, not always inviting or safe.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert use the medieval elemental model and apply it to object-oriented speculations about enmeshment, arguing that these intimacies might best be thought of as vortices—conglomerations of desire and strife (Elemental

Ecocriticism “Introduction”). I find this model of imagining ecological entanglements very productive, especially when applied to a medieval archive alive with trans-cultural, trans-temporal, trans-territorial, and trans-formational tensions. One such archive exists in the writings of Gerald of Wales.

In 1188, Gerald of Wales accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury as he traveled through Wales to gather support for the Third Crusade. Gerald’s relationship to

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Wales and the Welsh people was far more tenuous than his name suggests. A Marcher,

Gerald inhabited a precarious place and identity. In a time when England and the church sought to more fully bring Wales under British ecclesiastical rule, the Marchers found themselves a people caught in the middle of colonizing efforts. With ties to the Normans and the Welsh, Gerald’s own tenuous relationships are often mirrored in his stories. One such tale appears in chapter seven of book one of his Journey Through Wales. It is about a man caught in a love triangle, but the catalyst of his desire is not a maiden; it is a plot of land. Gerald begins this story as he does many in this wandering text of tales. He allows the physical landscape through which he travels to inform the story-scape within which his reader moves. His present intermingles with the past of each place, obscuring clear temporal divisions in ways that often bring to light the insubstantial nature of the geographical boundaries imposed upon the region.

This eco-love story emerges as he visits Margam Abbey near Port Talbot in

Wales. The Abbey, he assures us, is quite generous. It shares its substantial bounty, offering “open-handed hospitality” to all who pass through. The magnanimousness of the monks who inhabit the place is somewhat tempered by the scene Gerald describes upon the morning after his arrival. The parishioners gather to hear the Archbishop preach, but they did not gather as one mass. Instead, “English stood on one side and the Welsh on the other” (126). One might wonder who imposed this division or if it is a sign of a deeper divide. Without lingering on the observation, Gerald offers insight by way of narrative, seamlessly shifting from present to past, disallowing the reader the opportunity to imagine that either temporality can exist unmingled with the other. “At the time of [the abbey’s] first foundation,” he begins, “a certain young man of those parts, by birth a

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Welshman, kept making vociferous claims for certain lands which had been donated to the monastery, for he wanted to use them himself” (127). The Earl of Gloucester gifted the land to the abbey. Ownership cannot be legally disputed; through the granting of this gift, the man loses his connection with a space in which he is accustomed to inhabiting.

He becomes an alien on his home turf, but he is unwilling to accept the transformation and instead undergoes a different kind of alteration.

His loss prompts other alliances. He is changed, distraught, mad. He begins to howl, bay, and roam—becoming canine. His fervor mixes with fury and becomes fire.

The man burns the barn which houses the abundant harvest gleaned from the land he so loves. He is then burned from within, consumed by the same element that offered him a mode of rebellion. The man who fell in love with the land is left to join it—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—as he is transformed by internal fire, “howling” to the last.

One might imagine the sound reverberating through the grounds as the monks till the soil granted them by their God. Unwittingly, his corpse feeds the crops—body becomes fertilizer.47 His story clings to this place.

It is tempting to read into this tale of transformative eco-love a moral of divine retribution. Propelled by passions that place him at odds with the abbey, the man- becoming-canine-becoming-fire ends his days as ash. Gerald’s mention of the devil certainly seems to support this type of reading, but if we leave the devil aside and consider for a moment the kind of affective attachment the man had to the land from which he found himself divorced, we might find here an altogether different kind of tale, one that invites us to rethink ecological connection in terms that are deeply dislocating but also intensely intimate. Perhaps fire does not offer a means of punishment, but of

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requital. It is arguably the fastest way the man can become conjoined with his beloved.

Alienated and spectralized, the man in this story embodies Morton’s model of ecological thought. For Morton, ecological engagement should be unsettling. It should trouble us, move us, transform us. Morton’s declaration is more demanding than it might seem; he does not give us sci-fi and fantasy, but mirrors. When we relate to aliens and ghosts, we relate to ourselves, recast. The medieval speculum, a mirror that distorts as it reflects, is a handy tool for this type of work. The most terrifying monster is the one who is already in the house. The man in this story lived an intimacy that is both frightening and alluring.

What is it like to love a place that much, to burn for it? To go mad with desire for it? A medieval ecophile—can one still hear his haunting howl inhabiting the wind?

The tale Gerald tells prompts another kind of consideration, one traditionally much more rooted in human history. The story is indivisible from the encounter that prompts it. Gerald describes a religious service that takes place on the very soil that has mingled with the ashes of the immolated man. He observes that during the service, the

English and the Welsh are divided, occupying different positions that, one can infer, are reflective of other divergences. Gerald is, after all, there as part of a colonial project. The mission of his travels is to convince the Welsh to take part in the Third Crusade. It is no accident that Gerald finds himself a part of this mission. His heritage places him at the crux of the fraught relationship between the English and the Welsh. Perhaps it is this position that prompts him to adopt his particular narrative style. He moves through a landscape that is encrusted with story, mingling past with present. It is, as Carolyn

Dinshaw suggests, a temporal perspective specially suited to peoples and lands caught up in colonial encounters.48

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Dinshaw’s observations apply to more than what we might think of as typical colonial encounters. She sees in the work of those who devote themselves to studies of the past a mode of colonial engagement no less haunting than its imperial counterpart.

She turns to the work of M.R. James to explore this perspective. A late 19th - early 20th century scholar of medieval literature, James was also an avid writer of ghost stories. It is a preoccupation that Dinshaw sees as intimately tied to his professional work. Noting that many of his stories contain professorial figures engaged with work similar to his own, she sees in many of his ghost stories an acknowledgement of the risk involved in occupying a tenuous position between past and present. James’s stories, she writes, “suggest that loss is not only inevitable but also must be accepted, that curiosity about or desire for the past can be dangerous: such curiosity and desire can not only threaten the stability of your affective and historical self-understanding and positioning but can in fact kill you” (99).

Such a perspective is foundational to the ghost story genre as we know it today.

We can see Dinshaw’s observation play out in James’s story “Lost Hearts.” It begins with a precise description of a house as seen by a young boy taking in the sights and sounds of his new domicile. The overall effect is a somewhat melancholic one, though not overwhelmingly so. Rather, it is simply that this type of house – large, imposing, but generously lit – on this type of evening – mild, golden, but still – tends to have about it a somewhat pensive air. Typical of many of James’s short stories, “Lost

Hearts” incorporates some of the author’s academic interests concerning medieval literary tropes and topics, though they are augmented to fit the occasion. One of the main characters, Mr. Abney, is deeply interested in the beliefs and practices of pagans, especially those practices that are meant to prolong life and grant power over “the

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elemental forces of our universe” (20). Here, James seems to be drawing on the alchemical tradition, stressing that this kind of knowledge is not for everyone and initiates are deeply interested in exploring both the physical and philosophical aspects of their ritualistic experiments. Mr. Abney even names Simon Magus, a legendary sorcerer and gnostic, as a practitioner of the practices in which Abney aims to take part. James skillfully uses setting to create an unsettling mood, often revealing just enough to allow the reader to speculate about the meaning of the details noted and those left unmentioned.

Throughout much of the first half of the story, the narrator’s descriptive powers are applied almost wholly to architectural features—interiors and exteriors. Through these descriptions, home becomes a space that is almost familiar, but yet not quite right.

There is always something slightly uneasy about each scene, as if the bricks, windows, curtains, and small everyday objects whisper a warning, but are not quite loud enough to be understood. As Mr. Abney’s sinister designs on his young nephew are revealed and explained via pagan practices, the narrator seems to turn his attention to the outside world, noting especially the uncanny sounds that alert the young boy and the reader to impending ghostly visitors. Here, the whispers become significantly louder, but they are also decidedly more cacophonous. The eerie stillness of the house is replaced by insistent and numerous presences. The mood of the tale turns decisively with the following description:

The wind had fallen, and there was a still night and a full moon… Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moon-lit woods was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mere. They might be the notes of owls or water-birds, yet they did not quite resemble either sound. Were not they coming nearer? (“Lost Hearts” 19)

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As the scene unfolds, we discover these strange cries that sound like owls but sound too like the laments of “despairing wanderers” in fact herald the arrival of two ghost children who may or may not be the source of the disquiet. Mr. Abney has killed and taken the hearts of these two children to gain power and longevity, and on this night appointed to be the last for the young boy, they have come to seek their revenge and protect a potential third victim. In this moment directly before they appear and in the moment following as the young boy “caught sight” of the apparitions of a male and female child, sound plays an integral part. The confusion it brings about for the boy and for the reader is productive, alerting both to imminent changes in perspective. It is an occasion for fear, an encounter that touches the affected, suspending him in the instant as he takes in a “terrifying spectacle.” As is so often the case in ghost stories, a terrifying revelation quickly transforms into a broadening of understanding and a readjusting to a new perspective aided by information that heretofore was inaccessible. The narrator of this tale, which seems to be the young boy many years later, recalls in detail the two specters that stood before him, surrounded by that eerie sonic landscape. Each gesture registers and hangs with meaning, apparent only long after the encounter. In this instant, the world is illegible, ringing with activity that moves just beyond understanding. Fear stays the foot as the body takes in what it cannot yet process. Almost-owl screeches are accompanied by impossible silences. Sight betrays expectation as solid forms appear and disappear and movements happen in the fast-forward time of jump cuts.

James is often considered the originator of the modern ghost story. Many of the tropes he uses are commonplace in the genre today and one need not look too far to find allusions to his work in popular literature and movies. Concerning the period in which he

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wrote, James is certainly not a medieval storyteller. His subject matter, however, and the way he writes about the supernatural reflect many medieval ideas about the nature of the relationship between human and nonhuman beings. The decisive interest in detail and character are not common to medieval stories about spectral encounters, but the insistence that these encounters challenge categorical boundaries is in keeping with the materials James studied as a scholar of medieval literature. As illustrated in the above passage from “Lost Hearts,” place and person are not distinct entities. Obvious too is the idea that place can have and impart mood. It can affectively engage via enchantment and horror, two aesthetics that can realign perspectival relationship, invoking instead affective and phenomenological events of what I call spectral ecology. The term describes the spectral nature of place in stories of the supernatural,49 but it does not apply only to supernatural encounters, as I will explain later in this chapter. Events of this kind spectralize intimate human-in and human-as ecological enmeshments via emotive encounters of enchantment, fear, and wonder, disorienting and dislodging anthropocentric relational perspectives. What is more, these events highlight the colonizing nature of an anthropocentric perspective, meaning that they make more evident the trauma that results from the continual work of defining human against nature, or setting up the human category as a special case outside of larger ecological enmeshments. In the introduction to The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton explains his choice throughout the book to capitalize Nature when referring to “its ‘unnatural’ qualities, namely (but not limited to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery” (3). His usage of Nature with a capital N illustrates his desire to confront and challenge human-nature dichotomic thinking.

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As Avery Gordon notes, many modern ghost stories concern moments of cultural trauma.50 I argue that in the medieval spectral stories I reference in this chapter, similar moments of trauma are recognizable. It is a trauma that is not specific to humans and in fact is necessarily shared with nonhuman members of the ecological enmeshments we inhabit. Gordon is interested in trauma resulting from enforced social divisions that result in divided psyches—both personal and shared. Here too trauma is a symptom of divisive thinking. The humanist desire to interpret and engage with ecological enmeshments in ways that isolate the human creature effectively distorts affective, phenomenological—in short, meaning-making—bonds with those nonhuman others we live alongside and as.

Jane Bennett explains that, “It is futile to seek a pure nature unpolluted by humanity,” and it is equally futile to “define the self as something purely human” (Vibrant Matter

116). To paraphrase Bruno Latour, we have never been human. It is a philosophical orientation, dichotomous, rendering an anti-nature, anti-ecology, and anti-human divide between members of intimate enmeshments. It is important, however, to resist the urge to imagine an idealized past in which these traumas do not exist. This would be to invoke what Timothy Morton calls the “ghost of Nature” (5). To paraphrase Ian Bogost, while all affective attachments are equally good, they are not good equally. Some attachments, such as those rooted in sentimentality, can reinforce harmful modes of environmental engagement. A then-now perspective can be just as limiting as an us-them mindset. And, as is the case in cultural colonialization, the associative process is never strictly unidirectional. One party may instigate the encounter, but all parties are transformed through the exchange. So too, the anthropocentric “colonizing” perspective which I

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explore in this chapter is not the creation of the anthropos alone and humans do not escape its impact, nor are they singularly capable of reversing it.

The stakes of this argument are relevant and timely. While activist groups are mobilized under the banner of environmental justice, we most often continue to think of environment as something out there. We attach to it words like natural, wild, pure, and otherwise urban, cultural, and modern, distancing ourselves from entanglements, implications, and responsibilities. From this detached perspective, humans are placed outside of environmental entanglements, making it hard to trace lines of attachment that might facilitate discourses and actions which value the wellbeing of human and nonhuman members of ecological systems, acknowledging enmeshments that can be both healing and destructive. It is often through narrative and other art forms that dominant perspectives are challenged, and in recent years many well-intentioned artists, storytellers, and philosophers have used their skills to encourage a rethinking of what ecological relationships in the Anthropocene look like. Some use romanticized rhetoric to argue for preservation, conservation, and sustainability that facilitate human-environment relationships based on a human-as-savior model of engagement. Initially, this may not seem dangerous. Even though it quarantines nature as a pure but vulnerable realm— effectively, a politically feminized space—it does so to protect. Of course, protecting often requires a silencing of the one being protected, a policing of boundaries, and a dismissal of alternative agentive possibilities.

There is a real danger in this type of romanticized view of nature, as Timothy

Morton explains in The Ecological Thought. For one, it creates a “prepackaged conceptual container labeled ‘Nature’” (11). In so doing, it narrows and controls—it

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naturalizes—what we think of as natural, severing many vital attachments in the process.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the consequences of this worldview is the story of

Timothy Treadwell, documented in Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Treadwell, an animal rights and conservation activist, promoted a romanticized view of nature in which predator relationships could be overcome through patience and respect. He successfully lived among bears for several summers, but ultimately nature did not play by the rules he had imposed and he, one animal among many, was eaten. His work was controversial for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the danger to others who might buy into his views about the relationship between humans and wild animals and follow in his footsteps. Treadwell relied on an aesthetic that ultimately reinforced a binary he meant to undermine. His eco-love story exemplifies one risk of the romanticized aesthetic. It is an extreme case, but the underlying logic of the story is common. People want to feel connected to their environs. We desire and we want to be desired back. But desire is a volatile thing – it can be greedy, jealous, ugly.

Morton recognizes that it is impossible to abandon all aesthetic appeals, but argues that to think ecologically—to think in ways that foster and recognize attachment— one must let go of this prepackaged ‘Nature’ and rather choose to be an intentional and informed member of meshworks made of organic and inorganic partnerships.51 He writes:

“Ecology equals living minus Nature, plus consciousness” (19). By Nature, capital N,

Morton means the romantic aesthetic. To do this, one need not abandon affective or aesthetic modes of attachment, but should be wary of any aesthetic that relies on what

Morton calls “an aesthetic of cuteness” (The Ecological Thought 38). This does not foster the right type of affective engagement. Not everything that deserves consideration is

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“cute” or aesthetically pleasing. What is more, this type of aesthetic depends on representations of nonhuman others that draw on human-centric references. Big eyes, recognizable facial expressions, and even human-like postures and behaviors make up a large part of the cuteness factor and these characteristics belong to a very specific and small segment of nonhuman others. Some ecocritical movements attempt to capitalize on these characteristics and even seek to encourage and showcase them in specific species.

Think of any advertisement for an organization that seeks to save an endangered species.

Morton advocates a rather strange alternative, explaining that ecological thought—or intentional attention to ethical ecological engagements—“is about warmth and strangeness, infinity and proximity, tantalizing ‘thereness’ and head-popping, wordless openness” (12). Far from the romanticized, idealized, and anthropomorphized Nature which elicits feelings of closeness and affection, Morton finds affective responses rooted in uneasiness, disgust and even horror more productive. These, he explains, are the reactions we have when something breaks the “neat aesthetic frame” of the expected (44).

Such affective responses, then, have the ability to make us rethink and reevaluate our anthropocentric perspective. Morton might find the eco-love tale at the beginning of this chapter more suited to his version of ecological thinking. There is nothing cute, nothing settling about what happens to the man as a result of his attachment to the environment he inhabits. His desire is enflamed by a traumatic break in the heimlich, the home. His passions mix earth with fire, causing destruction to property, plant life, and his own body.

This eco-love version of the tale challenges causal relationships as such. Reason in nature is something that only happens after the fact. Perhaps the most obvious example of this idea is the evolutionary process. Looking backward, one may be able to trace what

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seems to be a logical line of evolutionary development for a species which ultimately allows that species to survive and thrive in a particular environment. This, however, is just a narrative we impose on what is actually a random species development, without goal or anything like intentional benefit. The aesthetic frame Morton advocates disallows narratives of reason to overwrite or colonize processes in nature. It also does not allow for nonhuman elements of an ecology to constitute background.

Lesley Instone supports a similar aesthetic engagement with elements of the more-than-human world, though she favors a model that focuses less on affective experiences of alienation and more on messy intimacies. For her, thinking ecologically calls for risky attachments that, “cut across the modernist categories of nature and culture, they stretch out to make connections with unlike and unlikely others, they cross boundaries between humans and nonhumans, the organic and the inorganic, and displace humans as the only actors” (“Risking Attachment” 32). She looks to art for expressions of this kind of attachment, citing the work of the artist Andrew Drummond as an example. Drummond is known for “producing engaging and dynamic large-scale mixed- media works that explore themes relating to the land and the human body, machines and movement” (“check out this stunning show by Andrew Drummond the artist who enacted a crucifixion”). To do this, he creates mixed media sculptures that often juxtapose substances like coal that are primarily valued for their usefulness to humans with formations that extract such materials from use economies, reframing them as almost alien substances. No less manipulated in their artistic forms, such materials attest to the co-creative process through which humans shape coal to fuel machines as coal shapes human lifestyles and even bodies that have become dependent on the material. Instone

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explains, “Drummond’s art reveals coal as an active element in us, outside us and alongside us and demonstrates the shift from coal as an inert object to coal as a risky and active entanglement” (34). A risky attachment is one that refuses more anthropocentric models of agency, insisting instead on the importance of agentive drift and its consequences.

Drummond’s recasting of coal invites his audience to experience the perspective- shifting power of wonder. Wonder, as an aesthetic mode, does real philosophical work. It is one way to risk attachment, which is what Instone challenges us to do. She explains that it is not enough to notice that we are enmeshed in risky attachments; we must also risk attachments through “the active search for different and interconnected practices of feeling, thought, and action” (36). Instone’s suggestion can seem particularly risky when applied to academic discourses that often value objective detachment from subject matter, insisting instead on a model of scholarship that positions the writer as the isolated and all powerful creator of a text. If, however, we hope to move toward a type of scholarship that can imagine and even invite more intimate attachments to environment—physical, social, textual—then perhaps this objective approach is counteractive, stunting instead of feeding risky attachments. Drummond offers one way to move beyond this type of engagement. Jane Bennett and Tim Ingold offer another. These scholars celebrate the generative quality of affective engagements of wonder, insisting that we need not look only to art for encounters with the material world that invite us to participate in productive perspectival shifts. Opportunities for this type of transformative entanglement can take place at any moment, in any place and at any time. Bennett calls this type of encounter instances of enchantment.

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Haunted spaces or landscapes recast agentive and affective environment relationships, thereby changing relationships with environment, acknowledging it as an active participant in encounters instead of a setting or backdrop. When our expectations are undermined causing us to pay closer attention to our enmeshments, distinctions between what is and what is not able to cause things to happen are blurred, as are our preconceptions about possible outcomes of these environmental encounters. It is not only the figure of the human that is spectralized in medieval stories about apparitions. There are phantom places too. These places do not follow the natural, which is to say naturalized, rules but instead exhibit nonstandard types of agency. An island can appear and disappear in response to perceived intruders. A monstrous child can turn into a whirlpool. A shore can come alive, threatening to devour those who walk on it. A stone can utter curses, making those who might cross its path choose another route by which to reach their destination. Like their human-esque counterparts, these spectral places are part of intimate ecologies, co-constructive relationships that, in these instances, act in ways that make more visible the performative work of what we typically call natural environment. Boundaries blur in both directions. Spectral places disrupt normative ways of understanding our relationships with and within our lived ecologies. The term ecology comes from the Greek oikos, meaning house or home. While the word does not exactly elicit images of domesticity, it does carry with it a sense of knowability. Ecologies can be large or tiny—familiar or alien. Naming an ecological system – the ecology of salmon or the ecology of the Black Hills—determines limitations, containment of a species or space. While this determinate quality is useful for linguistic and scientific purposes, it is deceptive. It implies rigid boundaries that do not actually exist. I am interested in spectral

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ecologies, or those trans-substantial collaborations that defy modern fantasies of order and logic. By so doing, they require us to reconsider our own ecological allegiances and what it really means to act in our own best interest as interest too becomes a spectralizing engagement.

***

Wonder-land: a speculative topography

Far from being backdrops for apparitional encounters, spectral landscapes act upon, alongside, and through those who inhabit them. Other ecologies act as specters. In

Gerald of Wales’s History and Topography of Ireland, there is a tale about a phantom island which appears near the Orcades (Orkney) islands off the coast of Scotland. Those who witness the appearance speculate about what it could be—perhaps it is a whale or other large sea creature—but as they observe the mass in the distance, they note that it does not move, occupying the same space for many days. This does not match the expected behavior of any creature they know and hence they begin to wonder about the nature of this landmass. If it is an island, one would not expect it to suddenly appear in previously unoccupied water, but if it is an animal of some sort, it is doubtful that it could maintain its position without any perceivable movement for so long. Finally, a group of sailors decide to investigate. They set out in the direction of the mass but as they approach and prepare to disembark, the land vanishes. They are able to ascertain with some certainty that it is indeed an island, but certainly not a typical one. Confused, they return to their own island only to see the mass reappear in the distance. This new island has presented them with a situation previously unknown to them and they must investigate further—they must experiment. The next day they decide to make a second

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attempt and meet with the same results; the island disappears when they approach, only to reappear once they return to their home shore. The sailors realize their actions seem to impact the island, though they cannot yet understand how or why. Too many people have witnessed the repeated event to dismiss it. It has become a fact of their environment and yet, it does not act as they would expect. It complicates their previous understanding of what an island should and should not be able to do.

On the third day, the inquisitive sailors decide to try their experiment again, but with one important alteration. An old man for whom this type of phantom island encounter is not entirely novel offers a piece of advice. For him, the quandary can be understood as an elemental interaction. If the right forces are engaged at the right time, the sailors will be able to stabilize the landmass and explore it on foot. He explains that when the sailors approach the island, someone should throw a red-hot iron arrow onto the land. Perhaps they trust the man because of his experience and confidence or perhaps they see some logic in his direction; either way, they decide to test his new mode of engagement. The sailors do as the old man suggests and are finally able to explore the island. Gerald writes that the fiery arrow has made the phantom island “stable and habitable.”52 He concludes this recounting of the occurrence by stating that, “there are many proofs that fire is always most hostile to phantoms” (66). This, the reader can assume, is one of them. The association marks an important premise in the text— landmasses, and by extension other aspects of what is too often dismissed as setting in narrative and environment in daily encounter, are not so different from humans. They are not inert, impassive. Rather, they are active participants in events. What is more, these things may not be readily trodden upon by human feet or encased in normative

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anthropocentric frameworks of knowing. It is more than just the sailors’ boats the phantom island eludes. It invites speculative encounter, rebuffing fixed categorical entanglements. What, after all, is a phantom island?

Gerald includes this anecdote as an example of the virtues of fire and so he does not dwell on the mysterious nature of the island itself, though he does observe in passing that fire affects not only phantoms but also those who have seen a phantom: “those who have seen a phantom cannot look upon the splendor of fire without falling into a swoon immediately” (66). Fire can work via association, impacting those who are once removed from the spectral realm. He explains that fire is “the most noble of elements.” He goes on, “It is, as it were, aware of the secrets of the heavens. The sky is of fire; the planets are of fire; the bush was on fire but was not burned. The Holy Spirit came upon the apostles with tongues of fire” (66). It seems that fire, by virtue of its association with the heavens—in both the physical and spiritual sense, as the two are conflated in this cosmology—is able to stabilize those things which, without it, are prone to movement, even morphisms. As Anne Harris notes, “Fire is the element that can strategize” (33). It can both protect and destroy, tame and make wild. Through contact with the flaming arrow the island becomes habitable, but the stability fire brings is never guaranteed.

Those who cohabitate with the element understand that it is both essential and unpredictable, inspiring love and fear in equal measure.

In this tale, we are given something like a model of a spectral ecology, or an enmeshment of affective, perspective-shifting and perspective-sharing entities. We can no longer assume that an island will stay put or even that it will remain sensible to approaching humans. It has an agency, an ability to withdraw on its own terms. That is,

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until fire and iron intervene. But even then, the surety they offer is a flimsy one. One flaming arrow might prompt the island to allow human inhabitants, but the next instance of fiery contact could light the entire island ablaze, transforming it again into a space not suited for human contact.

A common criticism of ecological and materialist readings, especially when they make contact with colonial archives, is that they divert attention away from human traumas. Many readers might find in the narrative-interpretive encounter above an instance of that anti-human swerve. But, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert explain, attention to ecological encounters that do not treat the human condition as exceptional need not result in an anti-human perspective. They remind us that humans are inextricable from the elemental enmeshments they inhabit. Fire blazes through our histories and our bodies (Elemental Ecocriticism “Introduction”). Embracing this perspective allows us to open up interpretive possibilities; archival encounters need not produce only one result. Like the fire that both tames and threatens the phantom island, critical narratives require vigilance, necessitate tending so they do not fully consume, devour, exhaust archives that are so much more complex than one perspectival framework can ever capture. That said, it is worth considering what this story might yield when approached through a critical lens that marries colonial and ecological concerns.

Human actors see land that they want to inhabit. When they realize the task will not be as simple as they initially thought, they introduce a human tool into the interaction—an arrow. It is a tempting interpretation, but such a reading—if it stops with colonial desire - threatens to dismiss nonhuman actors whose presences are so integral to the tale itself. If this happens, the story loses some of its most interesting and, to use Jane Bennet’s word,

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vibrant participants. Elements so crucial to the story are overlooked entirely, becoming insensible like the island to the eagerly approaching sailors, if we stick to this comfortable reading that grants full agency to human actors only. I would argue instead for a reading that recognizes human actors as mediators, as tools used by fire, iron, and island. Further, I would argue that this shift in perspective does not belittle very real human political encounters, but rather opens those encounters so that they can be better understood in terms that more fully acknowledge the complexities of human relationships to national identity, land, political agenda, and conquest.

Hippocrates suggested that within our bodies, we contain all four elements— earth, water, air, and fire. He added to this the idea that we are also made of the conditions these elements can generate—cold, heat, wet, dry (Elemental Ecocriticism 3).

While modern medical science has moved past the geo-humoral model described by

Hippocrates, it still offers some fundamental insights into the nature of those enmeshments we call bodies. We are beings of water, consuming what springs from the earth, burning sustenance for energy, respiring air. If we adopt this understanding of embodiment, we become more attuned to the impact those more-than-human participants have on our agencies, our histories, and the way we understand our place in intimate ecologies. It was from this elemental perspective that Gerald’s phantom island makes the most sense. Elemental beings, humans make allies of the elements to accomplish their goals. The collaboration is necessary; it is also risky.

Another reason Gerald may be willing to accept the fire and phantom island scenario has to do with how he understands the natural ecology of Ireland itself. The

Topography of Ireland opens with the claim that Ireland is a mysterious space. He writes

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that his aim is to present to King Henry II new and novel things “not found in other countries and entirely unknown” (31). At this point, he begins to develop a topographical account of agentive variance. Ireland, he explains, is at the very edge of the Western world and beyond it lays nothing but ocean and “boundless space” (31). The description is not an idle one, nor is he simply setting the narrative scene. Instead, he is employing an ontology of space that is most clearly articulated in the mappaemundi, according to which

Nature may act differently in different places. Combining contemporary ideas about geography and theology, the mappaemundi most often situated Jerusalem at the center of the world. As one moves away from this center, Nature becomes increasingly unruly. At the margins live monsters and giants. While Ireland does not exist on the very edge of the world, it was close. Gerald goes further, claiming that it is not only the location that allows for the unusual, but that Nature herself decided to use Ireland as a type of plaything or diversion. “[…] what new things, and what secret things not in accordance with her usual course had nature hidden away in the farthest western lands” (31)? Gerald introduces Ireland as if it were a character in a circus sideshow—secret, hidden, mysterious—it must be seen to be believed and Gerald will be the eyes through which this enigmatic land is perceived and known.

Ireland’s strangeness has something to do with its place on the map and perhaps even more to do with its political position in relation to England, but Gerald points to neither of these to explain its inherent oddities. Instead, he proclaims that it is something about the very nature of the land that makes it strange—or rather, it is about the land’s relationship to Nature. He explains: “For sometimes tired, as it were, of the true and serious, she [Nature] draws aside and goes away, and in these remote parts indulges

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herself in these secret and distant freaks” (31). In so stating, Gerald makes sure to draw a parallel between Ireland, existing at the edge of the West, and those countries of the East in which England was currently engaged in crusade endeavors.53 It is an exoticised people, then, that he intends to convince to fight for the Catholic church in an exoticised land. In these lands, like in Ireland, he states, “prodigies peculiar and native to themselves” exist in part, again, for the amusement of tired yet playful Nature.

Gerald’s tone here may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but his approach should not be wholly dismissed as a result. Again, he proposes a way to read natural anomalies or, to modify a term from the previous section, nonstandard agentive ecologies, that does not rely on divine intention as such, nor does it impose an overarching logic to global ecologies. Instead, Nature is personified and it is to her that intention is allocated.

Personality is introduced and, in this instance at least, that personality does not seem to be concerned with humanity. Nature’s deviations are for her pleasure alone. Their impact on humanity is unimportant. Here, Gerald’s concept of nature shares a lot with Timothy

Morton’s claim that there is no logical progression or end goal to natural occurrences like evolution. There is no predetermined closed system of meaning which dictates what one can reliably expect, or how one should definitively interpret, events in nature. This medieval personification of Nature also complicates modern sentimentality concerning human ecological enmeshments. Gerald does not give us a Mother Earth, arms open. And the “uncivilized” Irish are not her faithful children.

The phantom island appears in the second segment of three dedicated to the

“Wonders and Miracles of Ireland.” This section begins: “Now we turn our pen to those things which, appearing to be contrary to nature’s course, are worthy of wonder” (57).

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Gerald again reminds his audience of the similarities between Ireland and the lands of the

East, linking the two by way of the strange, marvelous, and hidden things which they contain. Ireland, like the lands which England was currently engaging in the Third

Crusade, is a space other, filled with the fantastic and the phantasmal. It is like the fairy otherworld in the romance tradition, complete with magical pools, monstrous hybrids and animate landscapes. This is the case in part, as Gerald has already explained, because it suits Nature’s whim. It entertains her. But such a fantastical description also naturalizes an exoticised version of a foreign place—or rather, a not fully assimilated place—casting other as alien. The aesthetic move has real social consequences as it is evident in other instances of Gerald’s writing that the Irish peoples, by virtue of their strangeness, are a lesser form of human. Perhaps it is because the Irish are treated as less than human that

Nature can be subversive in this space. But this explanation offers a one-way interpretive transaction only—human prejudices play out in a philosophy of nature. This is part of the story. But it is worth considering at this point that Gerald’s own relationship with Ireland is quite complex. If we read Gerald’s description of Nature’s attitude toward Ireland as indicative of his own, the result makes clear that enmeshments of all kinds are held together as much by attractions and similarities as they are by strife and contradictions.

Matthew Xavier Vernon makes this point as he explores Gerald’s tenuous ties to the

English colonial project in Ireland. While considering the ways Gerald exoticizes and at times demonizes the Irish people in his writing, Vernon observes that the move is informed by his complex relationship with his own colonial identity. “The monstrous tones with which Gerald paints the Irish,” Vernon writes, “redound to an exoticism that he seems to apply to himself” (415). As someone who is part Norman and part Welsh,

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Gerald is himself hybrid. His identity often leads others to question his loyalties even as they rely on his multiple affiliations to create alliances they themselves are unable to sustain.54 It may be that Gerald exoticizes Ireland and its inhabitants to distance himself from them in the hopes that the move will win the trust of the church. Even so, he constructs an identity for himself through such narratives. In a world where political powers can afford to be whimsical in their allegiances to him, Gerald may actually find that casting Nature in a similar role gives him the chance to adopt an alternative perspective on his own position. It is an elemental ecology, not a political one, that ultimately defines the Irish in Gerald’s writings.

Gerald’s tale of the phantom island accomplishes another type of philosophical work as well. He imagines a Nature that does not serve humanity, nor is it evil in its unwillingness to do so. Instead, she is whimsical—Puck-like. Intentionally or otherwise,

Gerald seems to be advocating for a version of animism, at least in some types of environments. As he ascribes to Nature human emotion, he imagines her as agentive, fully realized and capable sans anthropos. One may argue, of course, that this is only because he anthropomorphizes Nature, thereby placing the human at the center of even the most un-human—exoticised, alienized—ecologies. No doubt, this is a valid reading— one with which Timothy Morton would likely agree—and it can yield productive insights into how nature is understood in this story. While I want to acknowledge the importance of this type of reading, I aim to do so while holding open the door for alternate interpretations. By keeping both in play, the reading that exorcises the human and the reading that centralizes the human, we might be able to work toward an aesthetic

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approach to narratives of this type that more fully embraces the power of speculative association—and especially speculative association via personification.

Gerald of Wales’s description of Ireland offers a good case study for this type of intentionally duplicitous reading. He mobilizes a personified Nature to make alien the

Irish. In so doing, he also opens a space he can inhabit as alien. To do this, he draws on a long and complex tradition of medieval ecological thinking. Historian Robert Bartlett traces medieval history of thought concerning [N]nature. In medieval Christian theology,

[N]nature—and what should be considered natural—is the source of significant anxiety.

The Christian God cannot be unnatural—this would mean he subverts the natural order which he put into place and this type of subversion is the domain of devils. Since God is both author of and subject to the natural order, he should not be able to break the laws of nature. And yet, medieval Christianity placed great weight on the power of miracles.

When God performs a miracle, is he subverting the reality he created? It is a paradox; one that could land a philosopher on the wrong side of ecclesiastical favor. The development of medieval thought concerning the nature of ecology is in large part a result of attempts to solve this paradox (The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages 46-7).

One example of how this difficulty played out in medieval thought concerns how theologians and natural philosophers understood geography. According to Genesis, when

God made the world, he divided the land from the water. Literally, this means that he parceled out one mass of land and one massive ocean, but this does not match up with how many leading natural philosophers of the time understood the makeup of the world.

The idea that there were four inhabitable land masses and that those land masses were completely separate from each other seemed more plausible to these thinkers (The

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Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages 46-7). Not only did this contradict

Genesis in its most literal sense, but it also complicated the idea that God had revealed himself to all of humanity through the person of Christ. If there were four completely separate inhabited zones of the world, it was possible that some people may not have access to Christianity’s most fundamental revelation. The problem of how to get around these apparent contradictions urged many medieval thinkers to attempt to merge theological thought with natural philosophy (Bartlett “The Machine of this World” in The

Natural and the Supernatural). The result was a speculative topography in which God used affective responses to the natural world to evoke speculation which could then lead to associative relationship with peoples in diverse geographies.

Godfrey of St. Victor, an Augustinian canon living in Paris in the twelfth century, attempted to address these discrepancies by starting with a proposition both theologians and natural philosophers agreed upon—that the material world consists of four elements: earth, air, fire and water.55 Each of these elements has a particular density and the laws of physics state that the heaviest of these elements, earth, must sink below the others. The next heaviest, water, will sink below air which will sink below fire. The result is that, when acting under their own natural tendencies, earth would be surrounded by water, which would be surrounded by air. All of these would in turn be surrounded by fire. This, of course, is not the case or the world would be uninhabitable. How does Godfrey solve this dilemma? While each element does have the properties natural philosophers assign to them, including the troubling property of differing densities that ought always to mean land is drowned in water, God has intervened in such a way as to make the world inhabitable by allowing some land to exist uncovered by the next lightest element, water.

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Genesis states that God has separated the land from the sea. Godfrey remarks that God can act within nature in this way because, “Neither the things that go beyond their bounds nor those things whose bounds are transcended are of such kind that they can go beyond their bounds or be transcended naturally, unless the lord of nature had commanded that this transgression of the bounds should happen beyond the order of nature” (47, qtd in

Bartlett). Godfrey goes on to argue that if the “lord of nature” can subvert the natural laws and make land uncovered by water in one place, he can just as easily make land uncovered in four places. Importantly, this opens a way to conceptualize aspects of the natural world that do not act according to their known properties. There can be exceptions to any rule, as long as they are divinely ordained. Bartlett suggests that if

Godfrey had the term “supernatural” at his disposal, he would have used it to explain these instances in which God intervenes in the natural order (47). When the term does begin to show up in written texts in the thirteenth century and later comes into more regular use in the fifteenth century, it primarily refers to situations in which God causes something to happen that is beyond or above the natural order because, as the creator of nature, he rules it and therefore can control it (Bartlett The Natural and the Supernatural

13; “supernatural” Oxford English Dictionary). This is tricky terrain to navigate and anxiety concerning the exact nature of nature are evident in many medieval texts.56

Once divinity has entered the realm of the natural, materiality as nature enters the spiritual sphere. Theology helped natural philosophers to speculate about nature and in turn, knowledge about Earth’s geography helped theologians speculate about celestial geography. As there are different regions on earth, there are various spectral lands inhabited by the souls of sinners and others occupied by souls of the saints. Different

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places have different characteristics and, again imitating earthly topography, there are borders between the various spectral zones. But these two topographies do more than imitate one another; they can overlap, providing inhabitants of the spiritual realms the opportunity to cross over into the physical world. According to medieval Christian cosmology, purgatory offers this inter-realm contact. Gervase of Tilbury explains:

For they say that as long as souls are in the places of punishment, which, as it were, verge and border on our world, by divine dispensation they appear in visions to their relatives and friends as often as they wish, sometimes in dreams, sometimes openly in the semblance of their former bodies, and they make known the wretchedness and exigency of their condition; but when their time in purgatory is over and they have been conveyed to joys on high, they do not present themselves to our sight any more. (Recreation for an Emperor 589-591)

Gervase mimics the structure of Gerald’s Topography of Ireland in his narrative topography, allowing overlaps between observation, exegesis, and story. Directly following his explanation of this purgatorial borderland, there is a story about encounters between the living and the dead in which a tormented soul makes itself known to a holy man to solicit prayers that will lead to the termination of his period of penance. In this intermediary space, the actions of one, even when those actions are taken at some other location, can affect the wellbeing of inhabitants on the other side. Similar to the passage from James’s short story in which two children appear to a young boy, the holy man is alerted to the presence of spectral others through sound. These sounds are not distinguishable as human voices until after he conjures one to speak to him. One might ask how he initially interpreted the soundscape. Did he perhaps mistake the voices for owls as the young boy did in James’s story? Was he momentarily unsure from where the sounds emanated? It is easy to imagine that he may have experienced a similar feeling of

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fear and perhaps even of enchantment as he stopped to listen, striving to discern meaning and intention from the cacophony.

It is not only the eerie soundscape that marks this place as a space in between. It has physical markers that indicate its otherworldly associations as well. The holy man is on a walk when he crosses into this space where one may commune with the dead. He travels as though it is a landscape in which he feels at home, and yet he does not seem to expect the souls he encounters. He is not looking for them. He does not know how to read his surroundings for signs of their presence, but when they solicit his attention through their almost-human moans, he is immediately aware that the sound seems to be coming from a sulfurous mountain—a volcano. It is sound that first draws the man’s attention to the volcano, and then once it has his attention, he is able to understand that the sound is the wailing of souls in purgatory in part because there is a long tradition of reading volcanoes as portals to other worlds—be it a fairy world, an underworld, hell, or purgatory. But the relationship is a bit more complex than that. The holy man reads the landscape through a Christian understanding of topography that allows him to speculate about what types of environmental storied enmeshments he may be drawn into. In this sense, the Christian worldview is being used to colonize or inhabit the land in a way that aligns with a specific set of predetermined values. His belief system shuts down certain interpretive encounters in favor of others, but the associative connection needed to do this is not strictly rational. Instead, it is phenomenological and affective. As Anne Harris points out in “Pyromena: Fire’s Doing,” volcanoes—a mixing of earth, liquid, and fire— are also places of allure and desire. Harris writes that, “Fire embodies a metamorphic multiplicity” (42). Exploring Richard Rolle’s intimate relationship with divine love as

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fire, Harris moves quickly through morphic descriptives: “ignition, conflagration, smoldering, and dying” and their sensible effects. Ignited by Rolle’s fiery spiritualism, she jumps associations, landing on the fervor of song (42). The flame gathers meanings like moths to its transformative touch.

The volcano-as-portal in Gervase’s tale may be informed by mythic tradition, but it forges meaning too. Its defiance of elemental stability facilitates other material and metaphorical border crossings. As the man of God interprets the landscape and the encounter, he must also learn to speak with specters. To do this, he must engage in a mode of meaning-making that does not allow for clear divisions. Like the portal through which the spirit speaks, he must become permeable, instrumental in the doings of another. Incorporated by another, he is spectralized. Immediately, the holy man engages in a communication—not just with souls but with soundscape and landscape—that is associative, transformative, and transportive. This is most obvious in his initial reaction to the sounds he hears. They evoke a volcano more than they indicate one specific volcano. Already, then, the holy man is brought into an associative network of storied volcanoes. In the exchange, however, volcano is not entirely assimilated into the

Christian mythos. Rather, there is an important spiritual encounter that cannot happen without this portal. The mythos is transformed—or, more precisely, preformed—by an active, engaging, spectral ecology.

In this story-moment of transubstantial communion, there is wonder; there is an unexpected encounter that requires a perspectival shift. As the cries of the souls permeate the landscape and become a part of it to the point that they are not readily identifiable as individual cries or even human sounds, the holy man must stop in his tracks. He must

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attend to his surroundings, to the vibrations that reverberate and penetrate, to the sulfur that registers in his nose as its spiritual associations inform his imagination. Like the boy looking out his window catching the sight of two specters who cause him to pause, the holy man must stop in this in-between place. He is displaced and, perhaps looking to regain his ground, he solicitously speaks into this vibrant space. The spirit the holy man conjures is someone he knew before the specter passed over to this discordant land that is not quite other. The spirit was a neighbor of the man and this, presumably, makes his plea for prayers more compelling, drawing on an affective bond shared between the two humans, a bond that now must be absorbed, transported, and interpreted through earth, air, and prayer. The prayers were successful, as they almost always are in this type of story, but in this tale, that also alters the space in which the man and spirit meet. The spirit is removed to some other realm, no longer reachable to the man whose prayers helped to translate him into that other, more preferable, state. While the holy man is still capable of visiting the place where he can presumably still hear the noises of other souls, he can no longer share that space with his neighbor. We hear of no further interactions between this man and other souls. He seems not to feel the urge to conjure another and leaves this border space without further interactions.

The same holy man was drawn to a lake that, like the mountainous region mentioned in the tale above, also seemed to house distressed spirits. This lake had the peculiar quality of being quite murky until oil was added to its waters. Once the oil was introduced, the lake became very clear and the holy man could see huge bronze gates with iron bars. That sight, coupled with the shrieks of unhappy souls, convinced him that what he was witnessing were the old gates of hell which Christ broke through. This time,

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he tries no conjuring. We hear nothing more about the lake, the man or the gates. The tale is not a story of communal attachment, but rather it gives us an instance of wonder that challenges us to read environment not as setting or backdrop, but as agentive, even communicative. It shapes our understanding of space, molding our imaginations as much, if not more, than our imaginations mold it. Those who interact with spectral spaces understand that nature is not passive. All attachments are shifting in nature, products of movement or, more precisely, movement itself. To draw attention to this shiftiness is necessarily to blur, to complicate sustainability—substantiality—in a way that challenges the present’s relationship to past and future as much as it challenges the essential individuality of any specific thing in any given time. When we treat relationships and things as though they are stable—not shifting, not haunted and haunting—we become blind to a great deal of the politics of attraction and repulsion that are the fundamental movements of attachment as sustainability. In short, we naturalize environments, people, histories, stories.

***

Spectral toponymy: the making of a gorgon

Interestingly, Ingold suggests that shoes, and especially how they shape certain feet, might be linked to how we think about humanity’s place within or, rather, above nature. He summarizes an argument made by Edward Tylor, a nineteenth century anthropologist, concerning the shape of a ‘civilized’ human foot compared to the shape of the foot of a chimpanzee. In his discussion, Tylor clarifies that to best understand the differences between the appendages of humans and chimpanzees, one must consider not the naked foot of the ‘savage’ but rather the ‘civilized’ foot of a European. What is the

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difference between the two? One has been shaped by the shoes that cover and constrain it. In this instance, it is this shaping force—the shoe—that distinguishes the ‘civilized’ man. Ingold writes, “To the affluent, the constriction of the feet remains as sure a mark of civilisation as the freedom of the hands … Could it not be, at least in some measure, a result of the mapping, onto the human body, of a peculiarly modern discourse about the triumph of intelligence over instinct, and about the human domination of nature” (Being

Alive 36-37)? Ingold’s question acknowledges the colonializing perspective present in

Tylor’s observations, while also suggesting that our cultural interest in wearing shoes might be a colonizing act in itself. What is being colonized in this case, however, is not another culture, but rather nature. Ingold goes on to make an interesting argument about how technologies like the shoe and the chair serve not only to create an ideological separation between human body and natural surroundings, but between human modes of interaction—thought and physical action. What emerges is a theory in which human relationships with nonhuman others informs how we construct the internal self.

Relationships are how we understand ourselves and others, which means that these nonhuman others, whether we categorize them as technology or nature, shape for us what it means to be human. Another way to put this would be that humans use other things— technologies as well as “natural” aspects of their ecologies—to naturalize what it means to be human. As I’ve argued before, however, this process of defining never travels in just one direction. Encounters shape all participants to some extent.

Ingold cites the work of Wiktor Stoczkowski to develop a reading of the modern western body that equates uprightness—or an insistence on distancing one’s self from the ground as much as possible through posture and through technologies like shoes and

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chairs – with a desire to practice and signify “dominion over all other creatures” (41). His interest in contact as a (the) knowledge-making activity leads him to consider carefully how environment shapes the human body and how the human body relates to environment differently depending on how it has been, and continues to be, shaped.

Stoczkowski is most interested in how human bodies are physically formed through continued contact with other materials, but this physical transformation carries with it ideological implications. We interpret meaning in posture, status in stance. As the saying goes, shoes make the man.

In Courtiers’ Trifles, Walter Map tells the tale of a particularly powerful shoemaker who has the ability to create and kill, a result of a strange kind of love that stretches beyond the ordinary bounds of affective bonds. In this story, a shoemaker, the best in Constantinople, becomes obsessed with Satalia, a young girl of a higher social standing than his own. He becomes a soldier to win honor through service and quickly excels but, when he approaches the maiden’s father to ask for her hand, he is rebuffed.

This rejection becomes a catalyst, impassioning the shoemaker to turn to darker ventures.

He becomes a pirate with the intention of gaining not only wealth, but taking the maiden by force. Before he can accomplish this part of his plan, however, word reaches him that she has died. The shoemaker is not deterred in his errand. He becomes a necrophile, laying with the corpse of the girl and impregnating her.

Similar stories in which a dead woman is impregnated include the female as a personality in the tale. She is most often a ghost, though more corporeal than modern ghosts. Zombie might be a more fitting term, though it implies a history that does not fit these specters. This maiden, however, breaks from her confederates and shows no signs

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of life except in her ability to foster it. Absent from the narrative while alive, except as a catalyst for desire and action, she does not gain a presence or personality when dead. Her position brings up the question of animacy. She is a corpse - corporeal without localized agency. Unproblematic except that she exists in a narrative network full of women who retain agency even after death. She shares with these women the power of postmortem fertility, though she cannot be a mothering presence. Instead, she acts much more like a nonhuman member of a trans-corporeal ecology. For the shoemaker, the difference in her state seems unimportant and perhaps even advantageous. Her death removed his obstacles. She lay in the ground and it is there he can lay with her. It is there she will remain as a progeny grows in her.

After the night of necro-lovemaking, the shoemaker hears a voice. It does not seem to be attached to his beloved, but rather comes from the surroundings, unidentifiable but omniscient and commanding. He is told that he must return to the spot when it is time for the offspring of the union to be birthed. The voice does not specify a gestation period. How long does it take to carry this type of progeny to term? And what will be the nature of the creature once it is born? The shoemaker seems untroubled by these and similar questions and simply returns at the correct time. Here it is worth quoting M.R. James’s translation of the lines: “He obeyed the precept, returned when the time came, and opening the tomb received from the dead a human head” (367). Womb and tomb are conflated, morphing generative space into grave enclosure. It is not surprising then that what emerges is not a baby, nor even a body, but a fragmented portion. The voice that instructed the shoemaker to return to the tomb now warns him

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that he must not show the head to anyone except his enemies. It is a weapon. From its first moment of life, it is marked as a bringer of death.

Not one to miss an opportunity, the shoemaker decides to become a conqueror. He keeps the head hidden in a box until it is needed. Here again the creature seems human- like only in its looks. It appears to be a human head, but unlike a living human head, it does not seem to need air, water, or sustenance of any kind. It seems to be a creature that exists between life and death, though it is emphatically encrusted with both. The progeny of an impossible union seems to be compelled to enforce a similar fate on those who see it. It is a “Gorgon-portent” —a creature that summons mortality through sight; a bringer of death. It seems that while this gorgon retains the ability to kill those who see it, other characteristics are less clear. The narrative lacks a description of the head except to say that it is “like Medusa” and, as I’ve already noted, it does not seem to require water, food, or even air to survive. Even the word survive assumes more than we are directly told in the tale. Is it alive? Is this question even applicable to this type of creature?

I want to suggest that this tale provides us with an opportunity to think about an alternative to a living/dead binary, favoring an in/animacy alternative. The human-

Gorgon-head-portent troubles this binary, though its effects are less ambiguous. It imposes the binary by transforming the living into the dead if they behold it, but because one must look on the head to die - and if one sees the head, she will surely perish - everyone in the tale besides the shoemaker does not know what the creature is or how it looks. To them, it is a pestilence. As the reader might note at this point, pestilence is also the term used to describe femininity, and especially feminine allure, in the other tales in this section of Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles. The lexeme link is weighty, not just because it

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attests to a rather unflattering conception of female characters in these stories, but because it allows us to explore in more depth the connections between allure, death, and secrecy or hidden nature.

The expansiveness grows until it reaches beyond the logic of the story. The

Gorgon-head is meant to be the weapon by which the shoemaker kills and conquers but it is only meant to work through sight. The victim has to see the head to die, but at a certain point in the story, this is no longer the case. Intimate contact with the head is no longer required for it to be able to work. People can die without seeing the Gorgon and we are never told why this is. Somehow the power has spread beyond sight—so much so that by the time the shoemaker marries a princess, people no longer know why he is so powerful.

She must get him to tell her about the Gorgon head; it is a secret that must be discovered.

Map offers some context for this story, telling us that it takes place during the time of Gerbert’s “supernatural prosperity” (365). The Gerbert to whom he is referring is the same mentioned in the previous chapter, and indeed this tale follows on its heels. In so doing, he suggests a way of engaging with this story in which the reader is asked to dwell not only on supernatural occurrences, but on supernatural times as well. By linking the story with Gerbert’s love story in which he loves a woman who is fairy-like and prospers because of it, Map suggests that there is a potential causal or other agentive connection between the two loves. Gerbert’s beloved Meridiana provides him with financial and social prosperity. He even rises to the position of pope while with her. The shoemaker, however, meets a very different fate. His love does not respect the boundaries of the living and the dead; he asks no permission or forgiveness for his unchecked passions.

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They expand to monstrous proportions, mixing animate with inanimate until it is impossible to discern the difference.

After his initial desire for the maiden he could not have in life, the shoemaker formed alliances that resulted in relationship networks which exceed typical human encounter and yet, as his tale of terror reaches its termination—a termination among many—he finds himself in a position where he is expected to relate to a human woman once more. She is the daughter of the emperor of Constantinople. She is offered as a prize for his defeat of her father. He could not know that this human gift could undo him with his own inhuman progeny. She uses the Gorgon head against him. The thing that hung between life and death cast its shadow on its creator who does not have time to avert his eyes. Map does not tell us that the shoemaker dies; it is inferred, but other potentials are never quite negated. What laws apply to such portent-encounters? What logic can encase the monstrous, interpreting and ending its ways? The maker and the made, “the two enormities of the world,” are cast into the sea but find no rest in a watery grave. Their presence causes elemental mayhem, sickening the waters that swallow them:

The waves boiled up to the stars, and like flames rose up to the heights. But after a few days the purpose of the prodigies changed, and the waters that had attached the stars turned downwards and made a whirlpool, going about in perpetual rotation. What had been a heap is now a pit. For the slime of the deep, not able to bear the abomination, and the shuddering of the sea, was exhausted, and failed in stupefaction, and yawning with an infinite gape afforded them a path into the lowest parts of the abyss, and henceforward is able to absorb all that the sea in its cruelty can cast into it – like Charybdis that is by Messina. (369)

The whirlpool inherits the name of the maiden who was unwillingly implicated in its creation: Satalia. It is hungry, greedy, grabbing ships that traverse her waters. A

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passion that mingled life with death continues to do so, mixing sailor and sea creature in roiling waters. She is a spectral vortex.

***

Vivi sabuli periculis: a fearful quickening

Hot sands and cool waters meet and together they create a quickening. Stories surround this space. Stories of tricks, treacheries, lies and liars. Stories of repentance and loss. Double meanings, double dealings—they all collect here. It is in this space of perilous quickening, of “vivi sabuli periculis,” that Gerald of Wales brings us to the River

Neath, “the most dangerous and difficult to access of all the rivers of South Wales” (130).

In 1188, Gerald of Wales finds himself on the edges of perilous sands. This stretch of shoreline located near Margam Abbey in Glamorganshire, South Wales, is powerful, active, lively. It quickens the heart and slows the feet. It also brings to mind past journeys and those to come. Gerald has come to this place on a pilgrimage of sorts.

He accompanies Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury on a tour of Wales. They seek enterprising young men and wealthy elders, those who can be moved by the power of their Latinate speeches to join the crusading efforts already launched by the English. Not for the first nor the last time in their history, the peoples of that land are asked to unite with and serve the purposes of their ambitious neighbors. And Gerald, grandson of Nesta,

“the Helen of Wales,” on his mother’s side and recipient of a strongly rooted Marcher heritage through his father, found himself uniquely qualified to serve as campaign companion of the Archbishop (Bartlett Gerald of Wales 20). His travels bring him into human and more-than-human enmeshments that are perilous in a variety of ways.

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Gerald, the ambitious if not always personable son of the borderland territories known as the Welsh Marches nurtures dreams of obtaining a bishopric of his own. He sees himself taking his uncle’s place as Bishop of St. David’s, a strategically important diocese in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Then under the rule of the archdiocese of Canterbury,

Gerald imagines a St. David’s that is independent and distinctly Welsh, and so in 1188,

Gerald finds himself on shifting sands attempting to please an English king who has asked him to accompany the Archbishop of Canterbury in his efforts to recruit Welsh peasants to travel to foreign lands and participate in the crusades. Gerald takes a risk, hoping his efforts will win him favor with King Henry II and, eventually, the title he covets. From this precarious place, he looks forward to a time when the Welsh church will no longer look back to English Archbishops for its authority. But to paint Gerald as loyal to the Welsh would be to vastly simplify his complex attachments. While in the service of Henry II, Gerald’s ambitious nature lead him to closely align himself with the mercurial English King. For this Marcher, Wales was a marginal space, full of possibility and risk. His history with the land may have instigated some emotional attachments to the place, but his ambition pulled him in other directions. “[…] in the 1180s and 1190s

Gerald was an active agent of a power hostile to the Welsh and shared some of that hostility himself” (22).

For Gerald, this journey is personal. The land he moves through is both familiar and unfamiliar—home and not. His relationships in and with this space are always tenuous, perilous, shifting. His identity, his history, is comprised not only of the peoples of these various cultures and spaces but of the spaces themselves and the network of stories—histories, mythologies, oral tales—that entwine and create these places. While

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on this journey, Gerald is in flux. Like the two rivers that greet him at this point in his journey, Gerald occupies a space of convergence. Histories, desires, conflicts, and ambitions threaten to unsettle his footing.

In his writing, Bartlett sees a man embittered by his place in life, the journey he is forced to take and those he desires but can never undergo, concluding that, “He wrote as a hostile outsider” (39). But his position as hostile outsider is not always so clear-cut.

Take for instance Gerald’s description of Welsh customs concerning visitors and mealtimes (chapter ten of book one, The Description of Wales). When he discusses the dining habits of the Welsh people, he writes that: “Everyone behaves quite naturally, with no attempt whatsoever at etiquette” (236). Gerald’s idea of “natural” behavior is not free of custom; it is simply different from what he assumes to be the customs of his readers.

He sets the scene by describing what the Welsh do not do—they do not eat a large variety of foods, sit at tables, use tablecloths or napkins. He establishes a cultural baseline, measures Welsh customs against it, and declares that, since they do not adhere to these various mores, their behaviors are more natural. Yet again, Gerald seems to be describing the Welsh people as less socialized and more connected to their “natural” environment.

He goes on to contextualize some of their customs, primarily the baking of flatbread, by explaining that they are in this habit because it was the habit of their noble ancestors, tracing Welsh heritage back to the fall of Troy. He even describes how they sleep, noting that they share communal beds with all in the household. Each bed is stuffed sparingly with rushes and the sleepers cover themselves with a rough blanket.

Once they have slept for awhile on one side, they will inevitably become sore and cold and will choose at this time to get up, warm themselves by the fire and then return to bed,

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sleeping this time on the side opposite how they lay previously. The description is so specific, so rooted in sensation, that it is hard to imagine it is an accurate description of each and every Welsh man, woman and child. Rather, Gerald gives us an almost startlingly intimate recounting of a lived experience. Embodied and yet applied universally, the sleeping habits of the Welsh people work to present us with an indistinguishable mass of peoples whose habits are not born of a shared culture and custom, but rather result naturally from animal reactions to cold and pain.

Descriptions like the one above lead the reader to wonder about Gerald’s experience with the customs of “his people.” Was he accustomed to the hard bed and rough blanket? Did he too feel the pain of a bruise on one side and the bite of the cold night on the other? Did he rise and sit by the fire until the heat relieved his various discomforts? Did he enact this routine every night? In narrative moments like this, how much is Gerald aware of his own presence and how much does he feel his own absence from the scene he lays before us? The third person plural “they” echoes through these scenes of domestic practice. After describing the eating and sleeping habits of the people,

Gerald turns to their rituals of personal hygiene, which he praises. Again, the details are specific and particular, though applied, as before, in a sweeping fashion to all the people of Wales. In his examination of what would seem to be very personal points of conduct,

Gerald constructs one experience of embodiment and founds it, again, in a classical heritage, noting that Julius Caesar himself marked the shaving habits of the Britons (238).

For Gerald, space is always enmeshed in narrative or, rather, space is narrative. His journey is motivated by a desire to spread the story of Christianity to the people of Wales but as he travels, the missionary story becomes only one of many that collect around the

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sites he visits. He shares with his readers multiple stories about each location. Often, these stories will span a wide range of time and genre tradition. In the narratives attached to the river Avon and the province of Gower, Gerald includes personal experience, comical anecdote, historical account, and a regional folk story. Occupying widely divergent temporal locations, these stories are connected through the space in which they took place. What is more, they are all intimately implicated in the way Gerald moves through and understands this space.

More-than-human storying does not make clear distinctions between natural and supernatural, nor is it concerned with direct causal links. Irrespective of easy temporal and geographical boundaries, this type of narrative as movement perpetuates productive ambiguities. It engages via proliferation and invites multi-directionality. Like the phantom island, phantom meaning-making ecologies are comprised of a multiplicity of antagonisms and attractions that often work in unexpected ways and always depend on their diverse tensions to sustain, translate, transmit. These enmeshed spaces that require the reader to reorient him/herself, negating paths that multiply and grow in ways that thwart linear travel. Gerald navigates through both space and story in a way that does not allow for stasis. One must move to catch Gerald’s meaning.

Gerald gives us four tales rooted in the quicksand-encounter near the rivers Neath and Avon. The second of these stories is about an encounter he and his fellow travelers had with a particularly witty man during the Mass ceremony while they stopped at the

“place where the River Tawe enters the sea” (132). They journey to recruit and so at every point along the way, they attempt to gather to themselves those who can make a much longer trip to war with Saladin in the Holy Land and, where physical strength does

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not permit such expense, they look instead for pecuniary partnerships. Here, at the outlet of the river Tawe, they have a good deal of success. After Mass they are approached by an old man who desires greatly to travel with them but is unable to do so because of his advanced age. He is infirm but not poor, so he asks to substitute the penitential work of the journey with an offering of one tenth of his possessions. In return, he requests that half of his penance be considered paid. The Archbishop agrees and accepts the endowment. Half absolved, the man leaves but does not absent himself for long. He is burdened by the weight of his remaining spiritual debt and decides that his offering should afford him full absolution. Wholeheartedly it was given, and in like manner it should be received. Later, Gerald tells us, this old man returns to speak with the

Archbishop. He makes his case to the Archbishop, urging that since he truly desires to go on the journey but is kept from doing so because of his health, and since desire to do something is nine-tenths of the actual doing, his desire coupled with his offering ought to cover the entirety of his penitential balance. The Archbishop enjoys this bit of spiritual arithmetic and, pleased with the man’s reasoning, he embraces the penitent but we never learn whether the man remains half absolved or if his quick thinking leaves him wholly acquitted. Perhaps we are meant to dwell in the uncertainty of the parishioner’s fortune.

Perhaps, as compassionate readers, we are even meant to hope for the clever man’s sake that his petition was successful. Because we are left to guess at, but never fully know, the fate of the clever man, we become entangled in the exchange, suspended in the uncertainty. Leaving these two locked in an embrace, the narrative marches on.

Gerald next brings us to a scene from later that day. This anecdote deals not with a bartered agreement, but rather with a comical disagreement between two monks

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traveling with Gerald’s party. “That same night,” he writes, “two monks, who were waiting on the Archbishop in his room, stood chatting together about the events of the day and the dangers of the road” (133). One monk remarks to the other that the country is hard, referring to the difficulty of their journey. The other monk, perhaps misunderstanding the first or perhaps simply making a joke at his companion’s expense, disagrees and claims instead that parts of the country are far too soft. His appraisal has to do with the nature of the quicksand rather than the experience of crossing it. As if we stood with Gerald eavesdropping on the two travelers, we overhear the joke and move along before we learn how the disagreement resolved. Did they laugh? Did they argue?

We are again left in a narrative space of ambiguity, this time facilitated by a witty reminder that the same experience can be remembered and told in several different ways.

Was there a clever man who argued with the Archbishop for full absolution based on his fervent desire to do what his body no longer allows? Or did he spring from the imagination of this itinerate writer? Did Gerald invent the two unnamed monks for this joke? Were there ever two travelers, both tired after a long day’s trek, who discussed their quicksand encounter in such a way? Perhaps these questions seem beside the point.

After all, they exist now as characters in the world of this rambling text. They comprise a part of this quicksand story. But they also bring into question the relationship between

Gerald’s reality and the history he gives us. In these amusing descriptions of financial and terrestrial negotiation, Gerald delights in the productive nature of narrative mediation by relating multiple ways of experiencing and understanding the same events. For the quick-thinking penitent, a degree of ambiguity in the penitential schema allowed him the chance to broker a better deal. He emphasized the worth of desire to do this, an affective

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element left out of the Archbishop’s own calculation. Desire—in this case, the mental willingness to go on the crusade—opened a space of negotiation concerning the value of financial, physical, and mental compliance. Clearly versed in the practice of paying for the absolution of sins with action and money, the man’s willingness to believe that even in this system there is room for bartering purchased for him the admiration of the

Archbishop and, perhaps, forgiveness of his debt as well. Dwelling near the “vivi sabuli periculis,” this man has perhaps learned a little something about deceptive appearances.

With his days of traversing the land behind him, this man can still think like a traveler who in lands like this must be flexible and be willing to deviate from the path when terrain or circumstances require negotiation.

The story of the two monks negotiates language in much the same way. Using a humorous misunderstanding between two fellow travelers, Gerald plays with the multitude of ways one might experience a trek across the quicksand. Unstable ground leads, in this instance, to linguistic instability where meanings easily slip one into another. This time the negotiation does not result in a newly reached understanding between the two involved in the exchange, but rather Gerald allows meanings to compile one on top of the other so that he may share in the joke with his readers who are afforded a deeper understanding of what it is to stand at the edge of the quickening sands. The above episodes relate a variety of different aspects of journeying. The financial and physical costs of this type of movement, as well as the spiritual and political implications of partaking in such adventures, are placed alongside the embodied and encoded experiences of soft sands and hard crossings. These various components of the trip near

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the edge of the quicksand-shore are framed always by another anticipated journey to a much more distant and potentially perilous place.

Monika Otter, in “Quicksands: Gerald of Wales on Reading,” contends that

Gerald constructs an intricate narrative network. Seemingly scattered with relatively random anecdotes linked only to place as he moves through the land, Otter notes that

Gerald’s work is highly stylized, though he does not structure his writings in a way that invites a straight-forward reading of his journey. Rather, motifs build and meanings gather to form a narrative web that is often self-consciously referential and, at times, intentionally disorienting. His style invites the reader to linger with him in a space of narrative ambiguities. Otter writes:

This diffuse sense of reality and meaning causes Gerald serious anxiety, but it also empowers him, not unlike Walter Map, to develop his own ‘diffuse,’ secular poetic. His web of stories, themes, and associations helps him create a self- contained, self-consciously textual, ironically distanced world that is quite different from the discrete unites of topological meaning in the Topographia. Obviously, to the extent that it is not merely subliminal, the process of association, cross-reference, and ‘sorting out’ described above requires considerable reader participation. One of Gerald’s distinctive achievements is that he is highly conscious of that point and alludes to it frequently. (140)

Gerald insists on active readers that meet him in the space of his words. His journey finds its official motivations in a need to recruit others to go on crusade but the narratives that he records as part of his journey involve the reader in another type of conversive network. By rooting such divergent stories in a localized place, a shifting place of the quicksand at the point where two rivers meet—sand, water, and topographical names blend one into the other—Gerald creates the type of web which

Otter mentions above, but even more than that he holds open a space between where,

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much like his Marcher relatives, his reader can experience life in the precarious and, at times, perilous borderlands. In short, he invites the reader onto his home turf.

Where Otter finds a Gerald invested in creating and maintaining distance between himself and the world he describes, I see instead a narrator deeply interested in incorporation, intimately involved and entangled in the world he constructs for and with his readers. But this is not a world only of text, conjured image and imagined characters.

Rather, Gerald’s stories reach far beyond his Itinerarium. They resist being enclosed, capped off with introductory and final words, and instead pull into themselves other stories, other histories, other experiences, politics, sands and lands.

Perhaps it is time we revisit Elidyr and learn to join him in his lament. You may remember his story from the previous chapter. As a young boy, Elidyr, hiding in a field to escape from his school masters after being chastised one too many times, is taken in by a fairy-like people. He is allowed to travel between his world and theirs freely as long as he does not take anything from their world into his own. After awhile, his mother asks him to bring to her a piece of gold—it is abundant in the fairy world but very rare and precious in his own—and he agrees. As soon as the young boy attempts to bring a gold ball to his mother, he is banned from the other world. The path he once traveled easily he can no longer find. He is never able to return to the fairy kingdom and he laments this fact for the rest of his life.

The boy in this story is someone known to Gerald and so he can give some detail about how the event of the expulsion affected the boy throughout his life. Interestingly,

Gerald tells us that the loss of the fairy language was particularly devastating to the boy.

He remembered many of the words of that foreign language well into old age, but he

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never had the opportunity to converse in it again. The boy’s lament over the lost tongue leads Gerald to a short consideration of languages and some shared words in Latin and

Welsh. In particular, he is interested in the various words for “salt” —claiming that at least seven or eight languages have similar words for salt. Finally, Gerald gives us these lines:

If, careful reader, you should ask me if I think that this story of the little folk is really true, I can only answer with Augustine that ‘miracles sent by Heaven are there to be wondered at, not argued about or discussed.’ If I reject it, I place a limit on God’s power, and that I will never do. If I say that I believe it, I have the audacity to move beyond the bounds of credibility, and that I will not do either […] As Augustine implied, I would put this story, and others of a similar nature, should the circumstances arise, among those which cannot be rejected out of hand and yet which I cannot accept with any real conviction. (136)

Elidyr’s story does not simply spring up in the middle of this quicksand narrative; it is inherently quicksand-like itself. It is comprised of layered and moving narratives— narratives that pull one in, dis- and re-orient one in an environment that, from afar, looks rather static and safe.

Gerald is intensely aware of the power of alliances, and in this statement he expresses an unwillingness to choose one alliance over another. He desires to maintain simultaneously the possibility that the story is true and that it is false. He concludes by asserting that, by the power of the Christian God, wondrous things are possible but that just because something is possible, it isn’t necessarily probable. Truth here does not operate as a stable thing—it does not signify a one-to-one correlation but is instead an in between place or, perhaps, it is a hesitation. Relational in nature, it moves metaphorically, via association and proliferation.

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Gerald is invested in the work of wonder, of holding open a space for multiple experiences and multiple ways of understanding those experiences, and he is aware of the danger of shutting down meanings too easily. He is not in control of the fullness of the meaning of this story—these stories—that he tells. He says this is because he cannot limit the power of the Christian God, but we can also think about this as a refusal to limit the power of the other active participants in these narratives—other readers, yes, but also other experienced ecologies. Other quicksand events. Other losses of language. Other fairy folk and golden balls and exiles. As Wendy Wheeler explains, “Human beings are not most fully comprehended when they are thought of primarily as isolated and monadic self-interested individuals […] We are most free when the lives of our bodyminds— which is to say our lives as phenomenologically whole creatures embodied in an environment which also is really a part of us—are socially and politically recognised”

(The Whole Creature, 18). Humans become more human, not less, when we recognize in our stories and histories the vibrant and vital—sometimes enchanting and sometimes terrifying—nonhuman others. Narrative and other forms of art offer ways to do this. For

Elidyr, the loss of a linguistic connection—an ability to story alongside—is the loss of an ability to transrelate, to traverse a space through narrative. He is haunted by the few words he can recall, but these few words are not enough to revive the pathway that once opened for him a space within the space he knew so well. He had found another home and the loss of that other home was something he felt for the rest of his life.

***

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Story pathways and stony encounters

Elidyr laments the loss of a human-fairy story of which he was briefly a part, but spectral ecologies contain more-than-human storytellers. In book two of The Journey through Wales, Gerald of Wales includes the story of Llech Lafar, the talking stone. Its name comes from a local legend about an incident that happened as a corpse was being carried over the stone. As the body passed over Llech Lafar, the stone split and began to talk. Because of this, the people of the region refuse to carry corpses across the stone.

Gerald only briefly mentions this to explain the significance of the stone in local tradition. His interest lies with a more recent occurrence. King Henry II of England, at the point where his journey through the area crossed near the stone, met with a female petitioner who threw herself before the monarch and complained of a wrong done to her by the Bishop of St. David’s. Apparently, the King did not pay sufficient attention to her pleas for the woman was quickly angered and began yelling: “Revenge us today, Llech

Lafar! Revenge the whole Welsh people on this man!” The woman was quickly removed from the situation, but the confrontation did not end there. The stone became a catalyst for protest as the woman, while being forcefully escorted from the scene, began to recount an old prophesy of Merlin’s according to which an English king would conquer

Ireland and then die while crossing over the Llech Lafar. It was a well-known prediction and Henry II may have been familiar with it. Defiantly, he stepped onto the stone, crossed over it, and then declared Merlin to be a charlatan. A member of the gathered crowd quickly retorted, explaining that King Henry’s ability to cross over the monumental stone attested not to Merlin’s impotence but rather to Henry II’s own inability to conquer the

Irish people (166-168).

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We never learn the specifics of the stone’s other narrative encounter in which it was provoked to speech while a corpse was being carried over it, nor do we know what the stone said during that episode, but while Llech Lafar does not deign to use spoken language in the encounter with Henry II and the people gathered to meet him, it manages to communicate quite effectively nonetheless. The stone enters the account primarily as a mode of communicating to Henry that at least some of the people he encounters on his journey through the area are not pleased with his presence in their land or the way he is handling certain aspects of his governance. Through the exchange, competing modes of interacting with the history of the place begin to emerge. Merlin’s prophesy about an

English king is invoked and Henry II responds by directly challenging the efficacy of

Merlin as a reliable source. He does not challenge the idea that Merlin spoke the prophecy—Gerald tells us that much is firmly rooted in the tradition of the place—but he challenges instead Merlin’s ability to have accurate knowledge of the future, a future which, according to Henry II, exists in the now of the moment when he himself steps on

Llech Lafar and fails to meet his demise shortly thereafter.

For Henry II, his engagement with the stone as he crosses over it conjures the mythic prophet as the act calls Merlin’s words to account. But unlike the apparitions we encountered in Map’s tales, no phantasmic figure appears here. Rather, it is the stone that must either verify Merlin’s prophesy of, as the angered woman put it, taking revenge on the English King or, if safe passage is granted, challenging both the words of Merlin and the conquering power of Henry II. As we learn, it is the latter circumstance that occurs here and it is this ambiguity—the multiplicity of interpretational reactions enabled by the

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stone’s marked lack of action upon his monarchial treader—that makes the episode so interesting from a narrative standpoint.

Meanings accumulate at this point, meeting in the talking stone. It is the site of a miraculous encounter with a corpse in which the stone speaks, re-routs a corpse road, and breaks for its efforts. It is the stone associated with one of Merlin’s prophesies and, in

Gerald’s day, it becomes the site of a heated encounter between the English monarchy and the Welsh local inhabitants. I do not mean to imply that it chooses of its own independent stone-will to partake in strictly human politics. This is certainly not the case, for there is no such thing as an independently minded, anthropos-attuned, stone-willing rock. But the rock communicates all the same because there is also no such thing as an independently minded, anthropos-attuned, human-willing human. That is to say, there is no such thing as communication in a vacuum. Messages require a multitude. They require meaning-gathering movements and those meanings and movements are never the sole will and intention, sole property of just one – man, woman, king, prophet, or stone. These engagements are collaborative, but they are also confrontational. Resistance is a productive force.

An elemental understanding of enmeshment, informed by medieval theory as well as more contemporary understandings of trauma and the haunted psyche, combine and hold open the possibility of narrative encounters that can prompt something like Morton’s ecological thought. Like the immolated man in eco-love story with which I began this chapter, we are our burning desires, consumed and consuming. We are dispersive, intermingling, contaminated and contaminating. We are all aliens. We are all ghosts.

Spectral enchanting encounter allows for proliferation of allegiances through storied

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spaces. Gerald’s own experience of these places is intimately tied to the stories he shares along the way. Situated at the meeting point of two often contentious cultural identities, he seems particularly aware of the contradictory complexities inherent in all enmeshments and of the necessity to allow space for various loves, mournings, horrors, and turmoils. And all of these are part of a presenting past, the echoes of all of the stories and words and materials and travelers, and fires, and quicksands, and whirlpools, and packed subway cars, and strangers, and selves, and…

47 The 1989 film Society, directed by Brian Yuzna, offers a rather horrifying example of the type of exchange I mention here. The rich occupants of a town have the inherited habit of literally consuming members of lower social classes for sustenance. It is a heavy-handed commentary on social injustice—and a similar type of injustice can certainly be observed in Gerald’s story—but it also offers an image that I find helpful in thinking about ecological enmeshment more generally. The upper-class citizens who partake in the osmosis-feast are aliens, but they are aliens with a long history in the community, so long, in fact, that the designation alien is suspect. What makes these creatures foreign to the environment? How are they more alien than the other members of this community? 48 See “Temporally Oriented” in How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. 49 The term “supernatural” is anachronistic but still useful, both as a shorthand for the contemporary reader and as an expression of a common understanding concerning the nature of nature. Here, it refers to a being or event that significantly challenges normative expectations about the nature of reality—and the reality of nature. I address this important term in more depth later in the chapter. For more information about the evolution of the term, see Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. 50 In Ghostly Matters, one of the most widely referenced works on the topic, Gordon makes a very compelling argument that via hauntings, those ideas, peoples and events that a society has repressed come to the surface. Haunting events, then, often express experiences that have failed to find expression in more socially acceptable ways. I find Gordon’s work insightful and productive. It employs a psychoanalytic lens to ghostly or spectral encounters that I do not employ in my own work. However, I find that many materialists, object-oriented ontologists, and speculative realists rely heavily on concepts that were first expressed and explored by psychoanalytic critics. 51 Part of Morton’s argument is that romanticized ideas about personified Nature are entangled with nature – lowercase n – as we use the term more broadly. As such, it can at times be difficult to make clear distinctions between the two forms of the word. 52 The phantom island can be seen from a group of islands that, as Gerald informs us in the proceeding section, are ruled by the Norwegians. Within their already occupied territory, the new island may be considered theirs by default, but Gerald does not go into this matter. He is interested in a different kind of occupation, for it is not the Norwegians that stabilize this island but rather it is through the power of fire that this phantom becomes fixed in place. Fire here is a mediator, the most noble of the elements by virtue of the congress it has with the heavens.

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53 In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that mythic descriptions of global environments entered literature in the Early Modern period by way of commercial texts meant to entice settlers to move to foreign lands. I would argue that an interest in a mythic global environment developed much earlier. Gerald’s descriptions are an example of this. While he focuses on Ireland in this text, he does so in a global context, considering how Nature treats this land in comparison to other lands throughout the world. 54 Vernon cites an encounter Gerald had while meeting with Pope Innocent III. Because of his hybrid identity, Gerald was a promising choice for a companion on the missions through Wales and Ireland, but that same composite position made some dubious of his loyalty. In particular, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote to the Pope warning him that Gerald’s Welsh heritage should disqualify him from taking part in conversion and recruitment efforts because, “the Welsh stock of the Britons, boast that all Britain is theirs by right.” The implication is that Gerald will use his position to subvert English power in both Wales and Ireland (414). 55 Godfrey is working with the four elements model established by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE. For a description of how this model works, see the introduction to Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert. In the introduction, they explain how the forces of strife and love interact with each element, creating a cosmology that includes the human but does not revolve around “so small a figure” (3). 56 This seems to be of particular interest to Walter Map. In Courtiers’ Trifles, he often acknowledges that he either does not understand how a particular miracle is possible or he downplays the importance of identifying the cause of what we might call a supernatural event.

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