Economics of Otherness in Pearl: Fluidity and Identity
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In the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, the narrator’s effort to ponder the singular nature of heavenly bliss is systematically undermined by economies of difference. While the object of the grieving narrator’s reflection has perennially inspired debate, all analysts recognize that the poem’s structuring relationship is presented in terms of economic competition: a jeweler-narrator judges the pearl as dearer than any other gem set for sale or gift to another. In the dream proper, the Pearl-poet channels spiritual debates grounded in the contrast between the dynamic multiplicity and fluidity of earthly economics with the static singularity of heavenly sublimity. The Pearl-poet deploys the Pearl-maiden as a spiritual authority who highlights the differentially distracted poet’s inability to hold fast to notions of oneness. The Pearl-poet generates a dream topography that mirrors the narrator’s limited perception: the jeweler imperfectly imagines the stable, because immaterial heaven upon which his economically destabilized eyes cannot focus. The multiple rivers of the poem elucidate how explicit efforts to focus on a single lost Pearl are undermined by the ways multiplicity haunts the desiring dreamer’s vision. The poet undermines the earth-heaven binary by toggling between a central river and multiple potential rivers, and thereby reflects on both the artistic nature of dreaming and the specificity of anxious Christian subjectivity. Such rivers are the internal dividing lines that reveal potential others for a dissociative, because earthly, mind that only imagines individuals within a fluid world of others.
Abstract
In the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, the narrator’s effort to ponder the singular nature of heavenly bliss is systematically undermined by economies of difference. While the object of the grieving narrator’s reflection has perennially inspired debate, all analysts recognize that the poem’s structuring relationship is presented in terms of economic competition: a jeweler-narrator judges the pearl as dearer than any other gem set for sale or gift to another. In the dream proper, the Pearl-poet channels spiritual debates grounded in the contrast between the dynamic multiplicity and fluidity of earthly economics with the static singularity of heavenly sublimity. The Pearl-poet deploys the Pearl-maiden as a spiritual authority who highlights the differentially distracted poet’s inability to hold fast to notions of oneness. The Pearl-poet generates a dream topography that mirrors the narrator’s limited perception: the jeweler imperfectly imagines the stable, because immaterial heaven upon which his economically destabilized eyes cannot focus. The multiple rivers of the poem elucidate how explicit efforts to focus on a single lost Pearl are undermined by the ways multiplicity haunts the desiring dreamer’s vision. The poet undermines the earth-heaven binary by toggling between a central river and multiple potential rivers, and thereby reflects on both the artistic nature of dreaming and the specificity of anxious Christian subjectivity. Such rivers are the internal dividing lines that reveal potential others for a dissociative, because earthly, mind that only imagines individuals within a fluid world of others.
참고문헌 (21)
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