Pull Your Self Together: The Dangers of Dissociation in Old English Poetry

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that one way of reading the portrayal of misery in Old English poetry is as an abjected state; something against which the not-miserable self and community is continually being defined. It argues that, to this end, otherness of different forms is constructed as inherently miserable; and that we should therefore be open to reading unhappy figures as inherently othered. Using a range of poetic case studies, it goes on to suggest that this might be because Old English poetic unhappiness is associated with dissociation and fragmentation, which poses a fundamental threat to the profoundly networked sense of selfhood and intersubjective social system prevalent in the same poetic corpus. The social function of performing the poetry of alienation, then, is proposed to be a communal therapy of abjection, inviting self-identification with traumatised figures in order to abject that aspect of the self.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• dissociation
• intersubjectivity
• abjection
• phenomenology
• Old English poetry

Acknowledgements

Like any piece of academic work, this is the product of many people’s labour and energy. It would not exist without the conference on “Morality, Exemplarity, and Emotion in Medieval Insular Texts”, and the other presenters, participants, and organisers of that conference both inspired, challenged, and reshaped the ideas here considerably. I am particularly grateful to the editor, Niamh Kehoe, for her guidance and perception; and to the reviewers for their helpful insights and recommendations. I am indebted to the members of Heinrich-Heine-Universität’s Medieval English Colloquium for their many thoughtful comments on an early form of this discussion, and in particular to Miriam Edlich-Muth for her wisdom and support. Much of the discussion here was developed in collaboration with students who have worked with me in the course “For a minute there, I lost my self”, and I am grateful to them all for their ideas, their creativity, and their willingness to try new things, and especially to Susanne Schmidt for her thoughts on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also deeply grateful to Cheryl Livesey for helping me keep myself together.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ganze, “Neurological and Physiological Effects”; Harbus, “Affective Poetics”; Lee, “Healing Words”; Mills, “Emotion and Gesture”; Morrissey, Trauma Theory; Norris, “Sad Men in Beowulf”; Sebo, “Ne sorga.”

2 Noted in passing in “Healing Words,” 267.

3 Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. On other emotional communities, see e.g., Birnbaum, “Naming Shame”; Keskiaho, “Emotions Connected to Dreams and Visions”; Olesiejko, “Emotional Communities in Ælfric’s Maccabees.”

4 Dissociation as a sub-type of PTSD was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2018; the path to its reclassification and the currently recognized symptoms are discussed by Schiavone et al., “The Dissociative Subtype of PTSD.” Reinders and Veltman argue for DID as a severe condition in its own right in “Dissociative Identity Disorder.” The physical consequences of DID are discussed in, for instance, Sahota et al., “Finding One’s Voice.” Vissia et al tested patients diagnosed with DID and identified their fragmented sense of self originating from (primarily sexual abuse triggered) trauma, and as distinct from the symptoms of other related disorders, as discussed in “Is it Trauma- or Fantasy-Based?” A similar investigation also considering the effect on sleep (which it finds is broadly unaffected) is Dimitrova et al., “Sleep, Trauma, Fantasy and Cognition.”

5 On children and sexual behaviour in the penitentials, see for instance Frantzen, “Where the Boys Are.”

6 Schiavone et al., “The Dissociative Subtype of PTSD,” 2. There is a very wide range of medical literature on dissociation as condition and as symptom, which I do not seek to represent here; the references in notes 4, 7, 8, and 10 can guide the interested reader to the discussions relevant to the syndrome as understood here.

7 See e.g., Sahota et al., “Finding One’s Voice” and their references; for a broader discussion of the association between emotional disturbance and physical symptoms, especially paralysis of one form or another, see Hustvedt, “I Wept for Four Years.”

8 A full discussion of depersonalization and its symptoms, with a range of readable case studies and approaching the subject from a range of different perspectives, is Simeon and Abugel’s Feeling Unreal.

9 Queer Art of Failure, 84.

10 Narration as a tool for treating PTSD is widely discussed, but see for instance Sloan et al., “Efficacy of Narrative Writing”; and on talking to past and future selves, Sokol et al., “Continuous Identity Cognitive Therapy.” On self-talk more broadly, see for instance Kross et al., “Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism.”

11 Clayton, ed. and trans., “Christ in Judgement,” in Christ and His Saints, 33–87. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Old English are my own but usually with references to the translations of the respective Dumbarton Oaks editors.

12 Jones, ed. and trans., “Soul and Body,” in Religious and Didactic, 192–203.

13 The phrase, specifically opposed to post-Enlightenment constructions of identity, is used by Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 46.

14 Siri Hustvedt’s summary of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s position in “Delusions of Certainty,” 263. For Merleau-Ponty’s own explication, see his Phenomenology of Perception, at e.g., 273.

15 Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” 9.

16 For a foundational discussion, see Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading”; for a more recent discussion with useful references, see Hustvedt’s “Delusions of Certainty” and “Becoming Others.”

17 Frances McCormack discusses the “affectivity” of Christ III and argues that it is “directed more to evoking shame in humankind than pity”, in “Those Bloody Trees,” 160. On Old English poetry’s mode of working with its audience more broadly, I have been strongly influenced by Evelyn Reynolds’ reading of “Beowulf’s Poetics of Absorption.”

18 As broadly discussed in Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare. See also Németh, “Spectators Viewing and Acting.” For productive discussion of the “connective reverberations” that can result in “commingling materials, creatures, performers and participants” in a different context, see Wynne-Jones, Choreographing Intersubjectivity, quotation from 236; and for a more formal narratological discussion considering different media (though not mead halls), see Merlo, “Narrative, Story, Intersubjectivity.”

19 Powers of Horror, 3.

20 Ibid., 212.

21 On affect aliens, see Ahmed, Promise of Happiness. On the social control being exerted here, cf. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, at e.g., 200: “the group in power, by dominating the instruments of communication, setting the parameters for preferment, and locking out those who do not share their views, has a mighty influence on the emotional norms of a period—at least, on the norms that the historian is able to see.”

22 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

23 Ibid., 28.

24 “‘So What Did the Danes Feel?’,” 76.

25 Quotations from Beowulf are from Fulk, ed. and trans., “Beowulf,” in The “Beowulf” Manuscript, 85–295.

26 For a different exploration of perspective in the poem, see Richardson’s “Identification in Beowulf.”

27 Images of Community.

28 Norris, “Sad Men in Beowulf,” 215–19.

29 Edited and translated by Bjork, in Wisdom and Lyric, 56–63.

30 Edited and translated by Bjork in Wisdom and Lyric, 134–73. Anlezark follows the manuscript in printing Solomon and Saturn II as a separate text, of which these are lines 173–4, in Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.

31 Quotations from Cynewulf’s texts are from Bjork, ed. and trans., The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, with “Guthlac B: The Death of St. Guthlac of Crowland,” 33–75; “Juliana: The Martyrdom of St. Juliana of Nicomedia” 77–127; and “Elene: The Finding of the True Cross” 141–235. On antisemitism in Elene see Scheil’s seminal discussion in chapter 5 of Footsteps of Israel; and the first chapter in Lavezzo’s Accommodated Jew.

32 On direct and reported speech in Old English poems, see Louviot, Direct Speech in “Beowulf”, with a discussion of the dynamic between Elene and Judas discussed 28–9. See also her comments on the representation of the Jewish community at 201–4.

33 On tears in general in Old English, see Magennis, “Tearas Feollon: Tears and Weeping.” Compare Jonathan Wilcox’s discussion of Joseph’s weeping when reunited with his brothers in “A Place to Weep: Joseph in the Beer-Room”; and Mills’ use of it in her valuable discussion of “Emotion and Gesture.”

34 Graham, “‘So What Did the Danes Feel?’.”

35 “Ulysses,” in Victorian Verse, ed. Ricks, §11, line 70. Robin Norris suggests this influence of Victorian models of masculinity as shaping how we still read these poems in “Sad Men in Beowulf,” 211–12; and see now Rozano-García, “Sentimental Genres,” in this issue of English Studies, on the earlier shaping forces of Romanticism and nationalism. I am grateful to Dr Rozano-García for sharing an advance copy of this paper with me.

36 For a different resistance to traditional readings of the poem, see Soper, “Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy.”

37 For an engaging experiment in audience judgment and identification with King Lear and Sophocles’ Antigone, see Budelmann, Maguire, and Teasdale, “The Play’s the Thing.” On audience reactions to Shakespeare’s plays in a quasi-original setting, see Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare, at e.g., 31–3.

38 See e.g., Wagner-Lawlor, “Figuration of the Reader in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues.”

39 See e.g., Trilling, “Heavenly Bodies”; Horner, “The Violence of Exegesis.”

40 Much has been written on Heremod; here, I am particularly conscious of following two chapters from Wehlau’s Darkness, Depression, and Descent: Wehlau’s own “Beowulf’s Dark Thoughts”; and Morey, “Heremod’s Darkened Mind.”

41 Sahota et al., “Finding One’s Voice,” 251. It is important to note that Sahota et al. make the cultural specificity of symptoms of conditions like DID clear; their case studies are from the modern Indian context, but the association between DID and blocked physicality (e.g., muteness or paralysis) is widespread in the literature.

42 References to Boethius are to Irvine and Godden’s edition and translations for Dumbarton Oaks. These quotations come from their “Prose 21,” §4 (chapter 34 in Godden and Irvine’s Oxford edition of the text).

43 This quotation is used tellingly at the opening of Bruce’s “Unhælu.”

44 For a discussion of sitting down as a motif associated with “helplessness and dejection”, see Magennis, “Monig oft gesaet”; the quotation is from 444. It could be read in the light of Arthur’s analysis of “Postural Representations of Holofernes.”

45 “Darkness in the Universe, Darkness in the Mind.”

46 On grief in Macbeth read in a medieval (primarily Arthurian) context, see recently Casey, “Feeling It Like a Man,” esp. 251–7.

47 Wehlau, “Beowulf’s Dark Thoughts,” 140.

48 References to the Historica ecclesiastica gentis anglorum are to Colgrave and Mynors’ Clarendon Press edition and translation.

49 As noted by Magennis, “Monig oft gesaet,” 450.

50 Edited and translated in Jones, Religious and Didactic, 242–63.

51 Edited and translated in Bjork, Wisdom and Lyric, 118–23. For a fine recent reading of the poem, see Weston, “Wyrd Poetics.”

52 On the appalling inversion of heroic norms in the poem, see Magennis, “The Feast Scene.” Cf. Olesiejko’s identification of Ælfric’s Maccabees: “they do not represent heroism worthy of identification”, “Emotional Communities,” 17.

53 Magennis also considers the multivalency of an affective trope in “Monig oft gesaet”, pointing out that sitting can indicate both “passive hopelessness” and “clear-sighted wisdom”, 449; and see discussion 446–50.

54 For more detailed discussion of this idea, see Lee, “Healing Words.”

55 Ganze also notes the likelihood of widespread trauma in the period in “Neurological and Physiological Effects,” 226. It is worth noting that Ælfric seems to deliberately avoid hagiographies with this pattern, perhaps because he was concerned about lay people abandoning their social roles. See Trilling, “Heavenly Bodies.”

56 “Sad Men in Beowulf,” 210–11.

57 Ganze also reads the Wanderer as showing symptoms that we would now associate with PTSD, “Neurological and Physiological Effects,” 214.

58 See most clearly Schivone et al., “The Dissociative Subtype of PTSD”, and other references in note 4 above.

59 See e.g., Ferrández-Mas et al., “Emotion Regulation and Dimensions”; Niu et al., “Emotion Regulation and Internalizing Symptoms.”

60 Compare the language used by Graham of Grendel in “‘So What Did the Danes Feel?’,” 88.

61 Edited and translated by Bjork, Wisdom and Lyric, 98–101.

62 For a clear reading of the stories as a single sequence, see Lorden, “Legendary History in Deor”; on the text as Boethian, see Langeslag, “Boethian Similitude.”

63 This is, broadly speaking, what Thomas describes as an absorption-denial dynamic, in “Poetics of Absorption.”

64 Cynewulf also uses “ær ond siþ”, at 496, when the demon expresses the long past, present, and future in which he has and will commit evil.