The Fantastical Experience: The Relationship between History, Fantasy, and Reality in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere
1
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ... 2
Introduction ... 3
Chapter One: Theorising the Medieval ... 10
1.1 Introduction ... 10
1.2 Medievalism: In Search of the Middle Ages ... 11
1.3 An Experience of History ... 18
1.4 The Bodily Experience of Understanding ... 28
1.5 Neomedievalism: Creating the Medieval ... 35
Chapter Two: Bridging Fantasy ... 43
2.1. Introduction ... 43
2.2 The Approach of Fantasy ... 44
2.3 The Worlds of Fantasy ... 53
2.4 Reading Fantasy ... 58
2.5 Conclusion ... 63
Chapter Three: The Properties of Time in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere ... 67
3.1 Introduction ... 67
3.2 The Survival of Time ... 74
3.3 The Threat of Time ... 83
3.4 The Malleability of Time ... 88
3.5 Conclusion ... 94
Chapter Four: The Experience of Fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere ... 96
4.1. Introduction ... 96
4.2. The Structure of an Alternate World ... 99
4.3. The Experience of Alienation ... 107
4.4. The Acceptance of Difference ... 117
4.5. Conclusion ... 121
2 Acknowledgements
3 Introduction
Fantasy fiction enjoys a great deal of attention in contemporary popular culture. Since the early 2000’s many fantasy franchises have been expanded to include other media such as films, graphic novels, television series, and both videogames, board games, and role-playing games. Fantasy fic-tion typically depicts a world reminiscent of medieval Europe, mixing together various medieval periods and cultures into an amalgam infused with fantastical elements such as monsters and magic. Typical plots of fantasy fiction follow a lone hero on a quest not unlike those of medieval romances, where they face a host of strange and unnatural beings and events. In general, fantasy fiction takes up the admirable and exciting aspects of the medieval period such as knightly values, exciting ad-ventures, and romantic ideals, while at the same time ignoring the negative sides of medieval life, such as a strict hierarchical culture, and lack of modern technological advances. Fantasy adopts the material of the Middle Ages and playfully reworks it into new, modern cultural products. The fanta-sy genre is thus a meeting place of the modern and the medieval in contemporary culture, as readers are confronted with modern creations featuring modern characters in settings that resemble medie-val periods.
Unfortunately, the mixture of actual and fictional history in fantasy has also garnered it criti-cism. One oft-repeated criticism filed against fantasy is that it is not truly literature but mere escap-ist pulp fiction. Literary criticism is not devoid of this bias either; for instance, in an insightful re-view of C.N. Manlove's Modern Fantasy: Five Studies Ronald Curran identifies a line of reasoning by Manlove that inevitably condemns all modern fantasy (that is to say, twentieth-century fantasy) to escapism, ironically denying the value of the genre he is attempting to define.1 What, however, if we were to take fantasy seriously? If we take fantasy to be escapism, then where does the reader escape to? How does this escape from the real into the fantastic take place? If the worlds created by fantasy fiction are fleshed out enough with their own histories and mythologies and attempt to
1
4 ate a coherent universe into which the reader can escape, then the shape of these fictional worlds can inform us about the relationship between the real and the fantastic, and explain why these worlds attract us. Primary among the characteristics of fantasy worlds is their pronounced medieval flavour: while infused with magic, monsters, and mystical artefacts, their usual level of technology is roughly medieval and the political and social structures encountered in fantasy use the medieval as a model. The medieval world, apparently, has a large attraction for the authors of fantasy.
The resurfacing of aspects of the Middle Ages in cultural artefacts of later periods is investi-gated in the discipline called medievalism. While the exact definition of what medievalism entails is heavily debated, for the moment it can be roughly defined as the study of both the survival as well as the revival of medieval texts, practices, and models of the world. Medievalism, strictly speaking, thus examines only those modern creations which directly refer back to medieval origins. A bur-geoning young subfield of medievalism, however, called neomedievalism expands its scope to in-clude contemporary creations of the medieval. This is to say that neomedievalism has taken up an interest in new creations of the medieval alongside the reception of the Middle Ages through an intermediary. As a result, neomedievalism has turned its eye to the genre of fantasy as a specific type of engagement with the medieval. In this way, neomedievalism couples the historical interest of medievalism with a postmodern acknowledgement that the historical past is lost to us, and in-stead relishes in the playful creation of imaginative medievalist visions that mix the modern in with the premodern.
5 and through their contrast with each other the reader can judge them both. Getting to know the Middle Ages through this imaginative dance of the medieval and the modern is made all the more easy by the playful approach that typifies the neomedieval. Neomedieval contemporary fantasy tends to incorporate humorous material, playfully altering source material to humorous effect or otherwise inverting readers’ expectations about medieval tropes, so that they take creative liberties with the past, reshaping it to suit the needs of the author. As a secondary effect of this, the playful approach taken to the mix of medieval and modern constructs a carnivalesque space where normal expectations of, for instance, genre, plot, or historical knowledge are creatively undermined, which allows for a connection to the medieval without the intervention of the preconceptions of theoretical constructs.
In this thesis, I will investigate the relationship of contemporary fantasy to the popular per-ception of history, particularly as mediated by the playful approach of neomedievalist writing. I will argue that the playful aspects of fantasy create a carnivalesque space wherein the author is free to take up and change various historical elements and infuse them with fantastical additions that defy normal reality. The playful space of the fantasy novel relieves the reader of any requirement of matching the events described within to historical reality, and thus he or she is left free to directly engage with the presented narrative. In this way, the reader can engage with aspects of the historical in fantasy fiction and gain a sense of experience of a world normally absent from the present. Through the medium of the fantasy novel a contemporary reader can discover that the past is not truly lost to those in the present but rather is directly available to his or her experience. It is of little concern that the experience of this fictional past does not match that constructed by the constructiv-ist hconstructiv-istorian, as this thesis is not concerned with the construction of academic hconstructiv-istorical knowledge but rather with the construction of the popular perception of the past.
6 two fields, and chapter one argues how that allows the reader to directly engage with the past through the medium of writing. After this, chapter two examines how fantasy fiction can provoke a historical experience both through its generic aspects as well as its presentations of fantastical worlds. Chapter three is the first of two chapters that serve as a case study of the theoretical work presented in the first two chapters. It looks into how Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is intimately con-cerned with the concept of time, and how it manipulates the concept of time to create an image of a timeless world. Because of the intimate connection between the real world and the fantasy world in Neverwhere, it serves as a case study par excellence, and is a prime source for examining the theory in practice. The final chapter looks into the effect of the timeless world on the protagonist of Neverwhere, and argues how this forms an extended argument about history throughout the novel. The thread running through this thesis is that of the experience of the past by a reader of fantasy fiction, and direction is given to this thread by the continued interest in the playfulness of fantasy. The sense of freedom provided by the playful approach to history is the expression of the historical experience in the novel by an author, and it is this that enables the reader to share in that historical experience by proxy.
While the concept of the historical experience and the availability of the past in the present has been discussed by such scholars as Johan Huizinga,2 Frank Ankersmit,3 and Eelco Runia,4 as historians their emphasis lies on an experience of actual history provoked by items from that histo-ry. This thesis will therefore break new ground by examining how a work of fiction can equally provoke a historical experience, though from a fictional history from a different world filled with fantastical elements. Connections between fantasy and history (and particularly the medieval peri-od) have been researched by such theorists as Michael Drout5 and Helen Young,6 and the influence
2
Johan Huizinga. De Taak der Cultuurgeschiedenis. Edited by W.E. Krul. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1995. Print.
3
Frank Ankersmit. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print.
4Eelco Runia “Presence.” History and Theory 45.1 (Feb., 2006): 1-29. Print.
7 that reading fantasy has on its readers by scholars such as Jack Zipes,7 Jane Yolen,8 and Elisabeth Rose Gruner.9 To date, however, the relationship between fantasy, understanding, and history has not been investigated. As such, this thesis will fill a gap in contemporary research on fantasy fiction, and serve to connect it to the study of history through the investigation of medievalism. A sense of playfulness will serve as the connecting factor between these theories. Huizinga noted the intense connection between culture and playfulness, and this thesis will argue that this connection exists equally between fantasy and history. Thus, a playful approach marks the connection from fantasy, through history, to culture.
This thesis will delve into hitherto unexplored areas in the research of fantasy as well. Some of the seminal works on fantasy were written in the seventies and eighties, before the rise of the popularity of fantasy in mainstream culture.10 Fantasy is typified as “one of fiction’s largest and fastest growing genres” in a recent publication providing a brief overview of new fantasy litera-ture,11 yet unfortunately critical scholarship has to date not kept up with this trend. Greg Bechtel provides an excellent and nearly exhaustive overview of recent publications (he deals predominant-ly with book-length publications), and rather than needlesspredominant-ly reproducing his work, it will be ex-plored here to establish the current state of fantasy research. Bechtel divides theories of fantasy into three major streams, namely ‘the Todorovian, Tolkienian, and Mystic perspectives.”12
The in Literature Compass 1 (2004) ME 101, 1-22. Print.
6Helen Young, “Approaches to Medievalism: A Consideration of Taxonomy and Methodology through
Fantasy Fiction,” in Parergon 27.1 (2010): 163-179. Print.
7Jack Zipes, “Why Fantasy Matters Too Much,” in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43.2 (Summer 2009):
77-91. Print.
8Jane Yolen, “Magic Mirrors: Society Reflected in the Glass of Fantasy,” in Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly, 11.2 (Summer 1986): 88-90. Print.
9Elisabeth Rose Gruner, “Teach the Children: Education and Knowledge in Recent Children’s Fantasy,” in
Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 216-235. Print.
10
Jack Zipes, for instance, notes that two defining researchers in the field of fantasy scholarship, Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson “might have different notions of fantasy today after writing their seminal books in 1975 and 1981," in "Why Fantasy Matters Too Much," The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43.2 (Summer 2009). 79. Print.
11Charlotte Burcher, Neil Hollands, Andre Smith, Barry Trott, and Jessica Zellers. “Core Collections in
Genre Studies: Fantasy Fiction 101.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 48.3 (Spring, 2009): 227. Print.
12Greg Bechtel. “’There and Back Again’: Progress in the Discourse of Todorovian, Tolkienian and Mystic
8 rovian perspective he identifies as being “deeply rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis,”13
and while starting off from a structuralist point of view, Bechtel concludes that it “became a central influence for several poststructuralist/postmodernist studies of fantasy and the fantastic.”14
While Todorovian theories focus on the hesitation “on the border between the mimetic and the marvellous,” by con-trast the “Tolkienian fantasy operates simultaneously on both sides of the mimetic/marvellous bor-der.”15
Tolkienian theories are interested in how authors of fantasy use a “different type of es-trangement” that does not alienate but rather produces “wonder (a positive experience.”16
The last approach Bechtel discusses (and is clearly in favour of), he terms the Mystic approach. This ap-proach engages with the idea that fantasy hits an essential truth in some undefined and perhaps in-definable way.17 It contrasts the ideas of factuality and truth, suggesting that there is a type of “in-tuitive knowledge” present in fantasy literature.18
10 Chapter One: Theorising the Medieval
1.1 Introduction
In this chapter I will outline the theoretical background underpinning the argument that contemporary fantasy can supply a modern reader with a sense of history. By explaining how modern (re-)creations of medieval artefacts, stories, and world views can connect to a sense of the medieval past—regardless of whether they are accurate representations of that past—I will demonstrate that a historical experience can be evoked not just directly from historical artefacts,1 which is to mean actual historical objects, but also from modern creations referring to a past. The experiences provoked by such contemporary artefacts might be considered a historical experience by proxy, and I will discuss how in the case of fantasy fiction it may be accurate to speak of an analogous fantastical experience. Such matters of nomenclature are for the moment of secondary concern, however, next to establishing a coherent line from historical past to actual present through a fictional past. Crucial to this link is the reader’s experience of a novel, and the notion that while the events in a novel may be fictional, an individual reader’s reaction to these events will be real.
The second section of this chapter will provide an overview of the field of medievalism, starting with a brief history before continuing onward to outline its basic concepts. As a burgeoning and exciting field of study, there is still much debate on the exact limits of the domain of medievalism, and this section will try to strike a balance between providing an accurate survey of the field while at the same time maintaining a clear view of the subject. After this, the third section will delve into Huizinga’s and Ankersmit’s conceptions of the historical experience, and tackle the problem of how someone might have a historical experience from an object which has no direct connection to history. The fourth section will then form a bridge between the concept of the historical experience and the field of medievalism by investigation how a text might provoke a
1 Throughout this thesis, the word “artefact” will be used to identify a created object that can be perceived by
historical experience. Through the work of Helmuth Plessner on the relationship of an individual to his or her body, a connection will be made between an intellectual conception of history and a personal experience of it. This will lead to the final section which ties the historical experience back to the concept of medievalism with regards to the concept of playfulness.
As a whole, this chapter provides the theoretical groundwork establishing the relationship between history and fantasy. This will serve as the basis for the second chapter, which provides a brief overview of research done into fantasy, and suggests how the historical experience and fantasy fit may collaborate to produce a fantastical experience. Together, these two chapters will serve as the theoretical basis that underpins the following two chapters, which work as a case study exemplifying the theory. Of all chapters, then, this will be the most descriptive and theoretical, as it provides the basis for all to come. Nevertheless, much like medievalist works do with their source material, this chapter will strive to engage with abstract concepts and hope to make them come to life once more, both actively and imaginatively. That is to say, to bring these theories closer to their readers, so as to make them relevant to everyday experience. As such, the following section will engage with the challenging problem of how it might be possible to have a direct experience of something that is fully in the past.
1.2 Medievalism: In Search of the Middle Ages
The field of medievalism was opened up in the 1970s by Leslie J. Workman, who spent several years laying the groundwork for the modern conception of the term “medievalism”. According to an article by his wife, Kathleen Verduin, Leslie J. Workman himself dated the inception of medievalism—that is to say, the start of the modern conception of medievalism, as opposed to (for instance) the Romantic use of the term—to 1974.2 In contemporary usage, medievalism indicates both a survival as well as a revival of practices, ideas, or stories from the Middle Ages, implying an
2
understanding of the term medieval as a process rather than a description of a period, and medievalism as an act rather than a style, structure, or genre. One of the first articles that can be identified with the modern sense of the term followed soon after, in 1975, authored by Workman and Alice P. Kenney.3 Although the article is not explicitly engaged with medievalism, Verduin identifies medievalism as “implicit, however, in the essay's promise to examine 'the reciprocal influence of […] fashionable Gothic genres and historical knowledge of the Middle Ages'.”4
However, Workman dates the establishment of medievalism as an academic subject back to a session at the Tenth International Congress on Medieval Studies in 1976.5 Considering that medievalism as a field is interested in tracing the medieval origins of postmedieval cultural productions, it is ironic though perhaps fitting that its own origin is so difficult to pin down.
Due to the overwhelmingly interdisciplinary perspective of medievalism, it is equally difficult to find a comfortable place for the field within the academic world. Workman once commented that “the trouble with medievalism […] is that it doesn't belong anywhere in the academic world, and people interested in it might come from almost any field,” typifying it as a “new kind of interdisciplinary subject.”6
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the definition of medievalism itself is not set in stone. Furthermore, medievalism tends to take its inspiration from cultural objects that are not commonly examined by traditional academic work, such as popular literature and movies, or board and video games. Its variety of approaches combined with its wide-ranging subject matter has resulted in the term “medievalism” being subject to a plethora of definitions. Even a brief survey of work done in the field will quickly result in list of broadly diverging types of medievalism. The Medievally Speaking website, an online medievalist book review blog maintained by Richard Utz, lists seventeen definitions7 and four more definitions can
3 Verduin 6. 4 Verduin 6. 5 Verduin 6. 6 Qtd. in Verduin 7-8. 7
easily be added to this from the MEMO website, which is an online community of scholars of neomedievalism maintained by Carol L. Robinson.8 To complicate matters further, Verduin noted that medievalism “can be defined, too, as a form of intellectual history, including, however, the study of material culture and the relations between this and the history of ideas—which is not intellectual history as generally understood.”9
In a sense, Workman foresaw the difficulties in defining medievalism: his definition of medievalism is itself a plural concept (inspiring some scholars, like Tom Shippey, to speak of medievalism(s) rather than a singular medievalism), as each person's perception of the medieval will be different.10 For Workman, medievalism was not a strictly demarcated theoretical field but rather a method or a process of an individual's engagement with the medieval.11 While there may be difficulties in providing a precise definition of the medieval, this at least is the common thread running between the various definitions; in most cases medievalism is defined as involving an interest in the medieval. Perhaps the fairest (though as an inevitable result also most general) definition of medievalism is provided by Tom Shippey, who defined it as “any post-medieval attempt to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle Ages, for the modern world, in any of many different media; especially in academic usages, the study of the development and significance of such attempts.”12
While such a generalised definition might be considered too vague by some, it nevertheless represents what a truly varied field medievalism is. In Shippey’s definition, medievalism is a subject that touches a great many contemporary cultural productions. His description of medievalism fits the postmodern nature of its object of study, both being hard to pin down yet instantly recognizable. Nevertheless, scholars can still have an intelligible debate on medievalism in journals and conferences, which begs the question of whether medievalism truly 8 Robinson. "Definitions." 9 Verduin 7. 10
Elizabeth Emery. "Medievalism and the Middle Ages." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. 81. Print.
11
Emery 78; Verduin 20.
12
needs a singular, limiting definition. It is very likely that a looser definition much like that given by Shippey will suffice, and indeed might do medievalism more justice than a needlessly restrictive one.
A flexible definition of medievalism can be provided by examining common traits of cur-rent theories about the subject. One of the common aspects shared by many definitions of medieval-ism is the idea of the absence of the Middle Ages. Before the Middle Ages can resurface or be rec-reated they must first be lost. This concept is thus a prime requisite for any kind of medievalism. A sense of loss coupled with a nostalgic longing for the past thus infuses most works of medievalism. It is important to note that the absence of the Middle Ages requires a particular meaning of the word “lost,” however. The Middle Ages are lost not because they are separated from us by time but rather because the conventional definition provided by historians is no longer considered to be accurate. Medievalism recognises that the Middle Ages are “an artificial construct,” and that contemporary discussions of the period do not work to lift layers of confusion and unveil the truth underneath but instead add coverings of interpretation to the “palimpsest we now call the Middle Ages” (in the words of Elizabeth Emery).13 Medievalism challenges the concept of the “Middle Ages,” and en-courages thinkers to consider how the period is an intellectual construct rather than a historical fact.
Richard R. Glejzer’s engages with the idea that the Middle Ages can never be known in the historical sense. He suggests that in order to get worthwhile information from the medieval period, it is more useful to take the Middle Ages as a context for knowledge rather than an object for study in and of itself.14 As a result, the Middle Ages are placed in a unique position in history, namely outside of it. By examining the way people think about the medieval period and the effect this has on representations of it, the Middle Ages extend outward into the future all the way into the present. In this way, the idea of the Middle Ages becomes more important than the actual medieval period
13
Emery 81.
14
Richard R. Glezjer. "The New Medievalism and the (Im)Possibility of the Middle Ages." Studies in
Medievalism: Medievalism and the academy II, Cultural Studies, X. Edited by David Metzger. Cambridge:
itself. As such, the terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” become synonymous, implying simply a connection to the idea of the Middle Ages.
Abandoning the concept of the medieval period as a historically distant era separated from the present by time widens the range of phenomena that can be called medieval. Medievalism thus not only incorporates the passive reception of the Middle Ages but also the active (re-)creation of that period. Therefore, not only are the actual texts and artefacts from the medieval period the focus of the study of medievalism, but, as Lauryn S. Mayer argues, “its every subsequent representation in any medium” can belong to the medievalist corpus.15 It is not just artefacts that may serve as an embodiment of the Middle Ages but also ideas about the Middle Ages themselves may represent them by proxy. A suitable example of this concept is to be found in the history of the word “medie-valism” itself. In writing about the linguistic history of the word medievalism, Clare A. Simmons notes how certain terms in English shifted from indicating a historical period to describing a style. She notes that by the 1820s, the word “Gothic” increasingly came to indicate “an aesthetic rather than historical category,” with the apogee of this trend being Ruskin's definition of “'Gothic' as a style and 'medieval' as a state of mind.”16
This shift in meaning illustrates that the term “Middle Ages” became a less strictly defined term over time. As the idea of the term expanded “medieval” was no longer purely a concept of a historical period defined by the academia but it had also grown to encompass a feeling or a belief that could be held by anyone.
Simmons notes that the shift from the word medieval indicating a historical period to indi-cating a belief coincided with the rise of the notion of “the spirit of an age” that would typify an era.17 In this process, discovering factual evidence about the past became less important than trying to understand what a historical period must have been like. This shift in perspective proved to be a
15
Lauryn S. Mayer. "Dark Matters and Slippery Words: Grappling with Neomedievalism(s)." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Neomedievalism(s), XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010.
72. Print.
16
Clare A. Simmons. "Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. 33.
Print.
17
fertile soil for authors of the Romantic era, who rode the wave of “a new interest in the indigenous past not as a source of embarrassment but as part of Britain's heritage.”18 It must be noted that while Simmons’s article is focused specifically on the history of the word “medievalism” in Britain, this process applies equally to English-language writing in general. With historical fact lessening in im-portance in the popular perception of history, authors became freer to explicitly alter historical fact to suit their needs than ever before. The past could be washed clean of all that was negative in Brit-ain’s history, leaving only the positive and admirable elements that could then be taken as being typical of that period. As with Ruskin’s definitions of “Gothic” and “medieval,” this wave of writ-ing did not revolve around representwrit-ing history but rather about uswrit-ing it to influence public percep-tion of that history. What particularly marks this style of writing is an increased mixing of fact and fiction, and an interest in active recreation. While this is not a new development (propoganda, to name but one example, has a long history), it is a notable resurgence of interest in fictional recrea-tions.
An excellent example of this process can be found in John Simons’s discussion of pre-industrial popular literature. He indicates a process of medievalism at work in Pre-pre-industrial litera-ture that removes literalitera-ture from its original authorship and reworks it to fit a new market.19 That is to say that stories from the Middle Ages were rewritten in order to fit the tastes of a new contempo-rary audience while retaining their medieval core. He examines how Richard Johnson uses medieval genre conventions in a contemporary setting to provide an extra layer on meaning to his romanc-es.20 The key was, according to Simons, that the “motifs and incidents of chivalric adventure” were taken from medieval narratives and woven into fresh narratives in a “world defined primarily by
18
Simmons 30.
19John Simons. “Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature.” Studies in
Medievalism: Medievalism in England II, VII. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995.
17. Print. It should be noted that Simons’s comments are focused on chapbooks, but that they are indicative of a larger tendency within popular culture.
trade and industry.”21
This process transplanted stories about nobility and gentry into a world more directly relatable to a poor but literate popular audience. Simons frames this in terms of an almost political struggle, where medievalism is “a process by which literature is stripped of the personal ownership of authors,” and implicit with them a wealthy and courtly audience, placing the newly created product “outside of the privileged economy of the more official book trade.”22 What Simons here defines as typical of the medievalism in Pre-industrial popular literature can be taken as true for popular medievalism in general, in that it takes up matter which is normally restricted from common experience (be it through limitations of class in medieval or Pre-industrial eras or through familiarity in the contemporary era) and makes it accessible to a popular audience.
Simons describes the use of Middle English texts as “signifiers of desire and necessary ex-perience to which an otherwise deprived group reasonably aspires.”23
In that perspective, medieval-ism is a deliberate act on the part of an author to influence his or her readers. In more general terms, the medieval is used here as a manner of shorthand that indicates those images we aspire to while at the same time ignoring the less desirable aspects of the Middle Ages. This process of using the me-dieval period as a shorthand is precisely that which Carol L. Robison and Pamela Clemens define as being the “matter of medievalism,” consisting of “thousands of collectively owned tropes” associat-ed with concepts that tease our modern curiosity, expressassociat-ed with “’archaic’ language [that] also in-corporates values and value systems assumed to be medieval, such as honor, courtly love, religiosi-ty.”24
The subtle shift is thus made, starting from a perspective on the medieval period as a histori-cal concept, moving through a conception of it as expression an essential perspective on the world, to using the medieval as a toolbox from which an author may select building blocks to inform his or her reader with.
Medievalism, therefore, is an active and reciprocal process by which we both encounter and 21 Simons 11. 22 Simons 17. 23 Simons 17.
24Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clemens. “Living with Neomedievalism.” Studies in Medievalism: Defining
define the Middle Ages. In medievalist cultural products we encounter aspects of what we perceive to be the medieval, which are in a metonymical relationship to a model of the Middle Ages. Equally. medievalism is a process that works to define our contemporary image of the medieval period. In our encounters with the medievalist in modern culture, we add these perceptions to our model of the Middle Ages. This is the image of the Middle Ages as a palimpsest, where the medieval becomes a fuzzy concept that can be added to by contemporary creations that are obviously not medieval but still medievalist. This, then, is not the Middle Ages established by the historian, but rather the popu-lar perception of the Middle Ages. In order to examine how contemporary popupopu-lar culture works to shape the popular perception of the medieval, the discussion must first turn to how a reader interacts with his or her history and the possibilities of having an experience that history.
1.3 An Experience of History
In establishing a theory of how readers experience medievalist (fictional) histories, a valuable source of help can be found in theories of historical experience. The following section examines the relationship of the past to the present and the concept that the past is not lost to us. By combining the theories of historical experience by both Frank Ankersmit and Johan Huizinga together with theories of the bodily experience and the relationship of body to world as established by Mikhail Bakhtin and Helmuth Plessner, respectively, a theoretical framework is established of how a reader can have a personal experience of a fictionalised past. The final section of this chapter examines the usefulness of these theories for neomedievalism, and lays the groundwork for the foray into the analysis of the fictional worlds of contemporary popular fantasy fiction. Firstly, however, this section will investigate the idea that the past is available to a reader in the present, by indulging in a brief digression on the unique function that historical artefacts and monuments serve in our perspective on the past, leading into an argument on how fantasy fiction may do the same.
Historical artefacts are specifically separated from a general category of items as being different in some fashion. For example, the Bayeux Tapestry is explicitly marked as being a unique item rather than simply being identified as just a piece of embroidered cloth. The weight of history—or more specifically the observer’s awareness of its historical status—marks it as different and out of place. Ankersmit discussed this sense of history in Sublime Historical Experience, emphasizing that an experience of history “does not necessarily require a sudden disappearance of the dimension of time or some mystical union with the past” but that “the past can properly be said to be present in the artefacts that it has left us.”25 An artefact from the past is not simply an object but it is the vehicle for a sensation of the past. As such, Ankersmit proposes that we think of history not in temporal terms but rather in geographical terms. The crucial difference between the two is that a temporal separation suggest a distance that cannot be overcome, as we cannot physically return to a time in the past, whereas a geographical separation implies a distance that can be
25
overcome. Much like going on holiday to a different country, history is thus still distant from the present, in a sense, but it is also an area to which an observer could potentially travel. In that metaphor artefacts from the past become “protuberances, so to say, of the past in the present,” making the presence of history (through its artefacts) no stranger than “a traveller visiting different countries and then having an experience of a country that is different from his own.”26
Eelco Runia extends this concept to include monuments as well as historical artefacts. He argues along similar lines as Ankersmit in noting how monuments are unusual objects of our daily experience, typifying them as being “Fremdkörper (things that are out of place),” as monuments are objects of the past available to a contemporary observer.27 It is remarkable that he identifies with this not only those monuments actually from the past (such as historic landmarks or houses) but also contemporary monuments created to represent the past. Historic monuments, on the one hand, are survivals of the past reaching forward in time. These are objects made for normal, everyday use which have now come to be representative of the past. On the other hand, contemporary monuments are explicitly created in the present to reach backward in time and connect us to the past. Two crucial differences between Runia’s and Ankersmit’s work, therefore, are the direction and the degree of intentionality of the historical awareness. For Runia, the “modern, metonymical monument” does not give “an account of an event” but is “forcefully ‘presenting an absence’ in the here and now.”28
Their very presence is a statement on the absence of the past in the present, yet paradoxically bringing out closer to us by presenting it.29 Much like Ankersmit’s argument, it is not the actuality of historical connection which is important in presenting an absence but rather it is the attributed sensation of history by the observer that is important for Runia. A modern, metonymical monument can thus serve as a connection between the past and the present, and juxtaposes the two
26
Ankermit 115.
27Eelco Runia. “Presence.” History and Theory. 45.1 (Feb., 2006): 17. Print. 28
Runia 17.
29
for the contemporary observer.30 Runia thus opens up the historical experience to include not only actual history but also later creations meant to engage with that history.
In both Ankersmit’s and Runia’s arguments, the crucial argument revolves around the experience of history by an observer. Ankersmit only deals with actual historical artefacts in considering how the past can be experienced in the present, while Runia expands this idea by focusing specifically on monuments. The difference between the two types of objects is that monuments are created objects; a monument is either constructed to present or represent an event after the fact, or an artefact from the past is explicitly declared a monument. Either way, what then becomes most crucial is the realisation by the observer that he or she is dealing with a historical object. The creation of a monument thus demonstrates that a historical experience is not prompted by the physicality of an object but rather by the elements of it that an observer can somehow recognise as hearkening back to the past. Why then, would this process be limited only to physical objects? Could this process not happen just as easily with a text as it might with a book? Equally, if it is more important that an object has some metonymical relation to the past rather than being itself directly from the past, could a contemporary text not prompt a historical experience as well? These questions both depend on a deeper, more crucial question: how can it be possible to have an experience of the medieval despite it being temporally distant?
The answer to that question depends on Ankersmit’s perspective on experience and its relation to knowledge. Ankersmit refutes the possibility of obtaining objective knowledge of experience, referring to Thomas Nagel’s thought experiment in which Nagel attempted to describe what it was like to be a bat. Ankersmit asserts that describing an experience alien to human experience would require a language independent of either type of experience in order to be truly objective.31 As a human language would be intimately based on human experience, describing what it is like to be a bat in that language would only describe what it is like for a human to be a bat and
30
Runia 17.
31
not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. In essence, attempting to describe a bat’s ability to use echolocation would require describing its hearing in the context of human sight, such as saying that a bat uses its ears to see. The use of this type of metaphorical language therefore adds an unwanted hitchhiker in the use of the metaphor’s vehicle. Experience is by definition a subjective event (it is always a subject that experiences something else) and putting an experience into language involves an act of translation. As a result, describing the experience of a bat in English would involve translating—and thereby changing—the experience.
Ankersmit takes the position that “language is where experience is not, and experience is where language is not.”32
To claim otherwise, stating that language and experience are intertwined, would result in denying the possibility of experience in animals, infants, or anyone and anything else without the ability to use language—such an extreme position would be very difficult to defend. Ankersmit therefore argues that “experience will necessarily precede language (and concept).”33
While this may seem innocuous in barring our attempts to describe the life of a bat, it also has consequences for attempting to objectively describe an experience of the past. According to this view, the quest for greater objectivity in historical research has ironically resulted in a discipline which only moves further away from an understanding of a historical past.34 Experience is an essentially subjective concept, and because an objective approach necessarily cuts out the subject it misses the point entirely. Ankersmit therefore invites anyone interested in history to think about personal and direct connections to history, and making use of our subjective experiences rather than rejecting them in favour of objectivism.
it.”35
What this implies is that meaning can only be created through an interaction between a subject and an object (rather than a meaning being somehow implicit in an object). Ankersmit sketches out a number of distinct steps in that process, starting with “first, the text we read; second; the experience of reading; and, third, the representation giving an account of how the historian has read (experienced the text) and, hence, of what the historian takes to be the text's meaning.”36 This means that experience does not include interpretation (or, for that matter, vice versa), but that experience enables interpretation. In other words, experience is the process that enables us to move from text to meaning; it is the necessary starting point from which a reader can proceed to knowledge.
The notion of experience as a crucial step on the way to interpretation fruitfully combines with an interest in the medievalist experience. It establishes how a move from fictional depictions of the medieval to a model of the Middle Ages is possible. Ankersmit described the process in a playful metaphor, where “historical experience pulls the faces of past and present together in a short but ecstatic kiss. Historical experience is, in this way, a 'surface' phenomenon.”37
What Ankersmit means by the concept of a surface phenomenon is that the historical experience “takes place on the surface or interface where the historian and the past meet each other;”38
by which he means that historical artefacts are a gateway to the past, they are the contact surface for the contemporary historian to touch the past. This is in stark contrast to constructivism, which requires an objective distancing of the historian from the past; Ankersmit, rather, emphasizes and the proximity of the past to the present and lauds the historian who seeks contact. This difference in epistemology between Ankersmit’s perspective and traditional constructivism is underlined by a change in the metaphors used to talk about the past. Whereas understanding is commonly expressed in terms of vision (such as “seeing the point,” providing “new perspectives,” or “being blind to new ideas”)
35
Ankersmit 96.
36
Ankersmit 96. It is important note here that Ankersmit follows this up by saying that the third phase is "a representation of the text that was read and not of the experience of reading."
37
Ankersmit 121.
38
historical experience is expressed by Ankersmit in metaphors of touch. He recalls Aristotle's account of experience, where “there is a continuity between subject and object that all of the epistemological tradition since Descartes has always wanted to deny.”39
Ankersmit's opinion is that this means of obtaining knowledge provides “a source of truth and authenticity that will never have its equal in a historical writing carefully respecting the restriction of constructivism,”40 and while this is a bold claim indeed it must be admitted that the historical experience provides knowledge which is at least as valid as that produced within constructivist restrictions.
The shape that historical experience takes is eloquently described by Johan Huizinga, whom Ankersmit credits as being both one of his inspirations and the author of the “best account of historical experience,”41
which Huizinga termed historical sensation.42 Similar to the definition of medievalism taken up in this thesis, Huizinga locates the historical sensation between a reader and a text. While Huizinga specifically writes about history books rather than fiction in general, there is no reason to limit his argument to only that type of writing. Huizinga attributes the historical sensation to an act by the reader and, as such, to suggest that this sensation is only possible with history books would imply some manner of magical properties to these. Therefore, it must be concluded that a reader might have a historical sensation from any type of writing, as the very same process might occur in that reader whether or not a text was actually from the past. In Huizinga’s definition, meaning is not something that an author puts into a text using words, as it “lies behind and not in the history book,” but rather it is the reader's act “in approach of the author: it is their response to the author's call.”43
What Huizinga means by meaning lying behind the history book is that meaning is 39 Ankersmit 121. 40 Ankersmit 124. 41 Ankersmit 119. 42
An interesting aspect of the historical sensation, noted by Ankersmit, is that it is not a specific object, however, and should not be related to the "doings or thoughts of individual human beings" (Ankersmit 121). In the following section, however, it will be described how, through the theories of Bakhtin and Plessner, the process can nonetheless occur on an individual level.
43
something that starts from the text but is not located within that text; rather, it is an act by the reader to bridge a gap left by the text and its origin. Thus, while a historical experience is not the author's doing, it is still evoked by him or her; similarly, while the historical sensation is an act by the reader, it is impossible to achieve without it being prompted by an author. The model that is implied in Huizinga’s work (and by extension Ankersmit) is that of a communication between reader and object, wherein historical experience is a discourse created by the two. This interaction between reader and text is underscored by Huizinga when he describes the “not entirely traceable contact with the past” (that is to say, his historical sensation) as “equal to entering into a realm [. . .] moving outside of oneself.”44
The past is something to be touched in this perspective, and here Huizinga frames it most explicitly as a movement. The reader of a text must enter into a realm, though the specific shape, origin, and qualities of that realm are left open. Here we see again the metaphorical model of time as geography, making temporal distance something that can be crossed. This will resurface later in the discussion of Bakhtin on the idea of experiencing time as stepping outside of oneself and entering a place outside of the present.
The origin of Ankersmit's assertion that there is nothing mystical about the historical experience finds its roots in Huizinga's description of the historical sensation. While Huizinga may describe it as a different realm that we reach by moving outside of ourselves, he stresses that it is not a “re-living.”45
When Huizinga or Ankersmit discuss a sense of moving outside of oneself, neither mean an actual movement, whether physical or spiritual. The concept of movement is used as a metaphor to indicate a sense of understanding which is not quite fully intellectual but at least in part also experiential. Huizinga compared it to “an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather understanding the world through music.”46
The difference again is one of perspective: the metaphor of music emphasises contact, as music enters the ears and brings
44
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110. Ankersmit translated this concept ("een van de vele vormen van buiten
zich zelf treden") as "ekstasis" (Ankersmit 120). While "ekstasis" can be taken to mean "beside/outside of
oneself," in my opinion its connotations make it an unsuitable translation for the concept.
45
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110.
46
itself close to its listeners, as compared to the distance implied by a metaphor involving sight.47 Huizinga makes an interesting remark in that this type of sensation is close to understanding the world through a piece of music, rather than understanding the music itself. Music becomes the carrier of meaning—a representation of the world that we can experience, and through that experience construct knowledge of the world that it originated from. Merely understanding the music itself would only provide half of the picture; to obtain complete knowledge of this type of understanding, the subjective experience of music must be included.
Despite the fact that Huizinga indicates that the historical experience can be evoked by the simplest of objects,48 historical experiences are not readily available to readers at the drop of a hat. They are subject to a historical inertia, together with a tendency to be locked into the present. Ankersmit terms this inertia a “thick crust of interpretation,” a weight of history that presses on artefacts and prevents them from triggering historical experiences.49 The intellectual aspect of a subjective experiencer prevents the experiential from taking over and allowing us direct contact; rather, a subject interacts with the theoretical models of history that he or she is aware of. This is why ordinary objects are more likely to evoke historical experiences than great works of art, as the latter are covered by the weight of interpretation that functions as a wall between their perceivers and the past. Ordinary objects (that is to say, artefacts not taken up under the banner of “high culture”) come with less interpretation attached, and are thus easier to “decontextualize,” in the words of Ankersmit.50 The task of the reader wishing to have a historical experience is to resist the interpretation and view the artefact as is. While both Ankersmit and Huizinga describe mainly the problems that pre-interpreted art pose for the historical experience, they do not engage with the question of how a reader can overcome such interpretation and decontextualise art in order to have a
47
While, strictly speaking, sight also functions by means of light entering the eye, the object is constructed away from us in the visual field. Music, on the other hand, surrounds us acoustically, and thus can be experienced as being much closer to us.
48
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110; Ankersmit 125.
49
Ankersmit 126-127.
50
historical experience. The solution to that problem comes from a surprising field, to which Huizinga has also applied his pen: the study of play.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga described play (incorporating, for Huizinga, such diverse forms of play as playfulness, games, jesting and other such categories) as being an aspect crucial to yet separate from culture. Common to the theories of historical experience so far is the conception of an alternate world to which the reader of a text may move, so as to gain an experience. This is no less true for Huizinga’s conception of play which, according to him, constructs an alternate world that is unique and orderly, though fragile. Rules determine the shape and boundaries of a unique world of play, and in the violation of these the playful alternate world would instantly disappear, returning the players to normal reality.51 Conversely, the rules of normal life have neither hold nor place in the world of play,52 as play is separate from the normal order of things and belongs within its own boundaries of time and place. A prime example of this can be found in children playing pretend. Within the game, there is no question whether or not monsters, heroes, or spaceships could exist, but they are accepted as a natural part of an alternate reality. As soon as reality intrudes (for instance in a parent’s call to dinner) the alternate world, having served its purpose, ceases to be. In Huizinga's words, play “has its course and its meaning to itself.”53 The same argument provided for historical experience applies in the case of the worlds of play: these are, of course, no mystical realms but conceptual spaces outside of the normal reckoning of everyday life. In order to establish that these ahistorical realms are of the type suggested by the historical experience (that place where a reader moves to, in the sense of being beside ourselves that Huizinga suggested), the relationship between play and culture that Huizinga indicated will be examined. This will provide a ground from which an analysis of the influence of play on the historical experience can proceed.
51
Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der Cultuur. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon N.V., 1940. 17. Print.
52
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 19.
53
Huizinga considers play to be separate from but related to culture,54 as play is its central testing ground. Firstly, he argues that play is indicative of cultural perspectives, as “the community expresses her interpretation of life and the world”55
in games. Games and play are, in this sense, models of reality. These models highlight aspects of culture, and the ways in which they interact in the alternate world can be indicative of their relationship in the real world. Play is not, however, a response to culture; in fact, for Huizinga, play is “the primary, objectively observable, concretely determined fact, while culture is only the qualification that connects our historical judgement to a given case.”56
With this Huizinga asserts that the world of play is our primary, unimpeded experience of reality, and that culture is therefore the abstraction of play. This is supported by his statement that “culture arises in the form of play—which is to say that it is initially played.”57 This clarifies the relationship of play to historical experience, forming an analogue to Ankersmit's assertion that great works of art are obscured by layers of interpretation. Indeed, it can be seen that in Huizinga's view culture forms the layer that obscures the influence of play on life. In that sense, the return to a state of play mirrors the return to a direct experience of a representation of the past. In order to examine how this move is possible, attention must now be given to the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and his conception of the carnivalesque.
1.4 The Bodily Experience of Understanding
The idea of timelessness being connected to laughter and playfulness was established by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work on François Rabelais and carnivalesque laughter.58 Much like how the historical experience existing between a reader and a text, Bakhtin conceptualises carnival as existing in the
54
While English translations of Homo Ludens frequently render the title as "A Study of the Play-Element in Culture" (for example: Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Trans. Kegan Paul. London: Routledge, 1980) the Dutch title reads "Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der Cultuur," suggesting it is an element of, not an element in.
55
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
56
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
57
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
58
interstitial space between art and life. Specifically, he states that the “basic carnival nucleus of this [folk] culture [. . .] does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art” but rather to “the borderline between art and life.”59
Much like Huizinga’s ideas on play, Bakhtin defines carnival as being “life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.”60 Bakhtin as well, therefore, defines playfulness (in his idea of the carnivalesque) as being a true expression of life, and a core element of the human experience. For Bakhtin, the ahistorical realm of play (which he terms the second life of the people61) is a universal experience that encompasses all individuals, and is deeply positive in nature.62 Bakhtin goes as far as saying that carnival is “the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.”63
This has resulted in Bakhtin being criticised for his ahistorical perspective. Because he was interested in describing the culture of the Middle Ages as a whole yet placed carnival in an ahistorical position, he is accused of “re-instating one particular historical form of laughter as laughter's anthropological and timeless essence.”64
While Bakhtin might be said to fail at providing an accurate description of laughter in the medieval period, the function his carnivalesque laughter plays in transporting people to an alternate world of play still stands strong as a point of reference. In fact, the ahistorical aspect of the carnivalesque play and its association with an alternate world forms the central focus of the following investigation. Bakhtin’s theory is here not used as a theory of history or as an account of some medieval reality, but rather as a perspective on history or a means of engaging with the past. As such, the question of its factual accuracy falls by the wayside. It is the imaginative power of his vision that informs the investigating into the relationship between playfulness and history.
In Bakhtin’s perspective, time in and of itself has little meaning. It is only through its 59 Bakhtin, 7 60 Bakhtin 7. 61 Bakhtin 9. 62 Bakhtin 19. 63 Bakhtin 9. 64
Manfred Pfister. Introduction. A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and
interaction with culture that time is given shape and becomes a relevant concept to an individual’s experience. For instance, he suggests that at the “primitive level of development” in culture, time was viewed as a cyclical process, as it was connected to cycles of natural and biological life.65 However, as time progressed various historical and social phenomena inserted themselves into the concept of cyclical time until finally, during the Renaissance, the idea of cyclical time gave way to (as Bakhtin phrases it) “a mighty awareness of history and historic change.”66 Bakhtin himself was acutely aware of historic change, as Ken Hirschkop eloquently describes:
He [Bakhtin] saw the passage of time as a mountainside down which flowed, with an initially erratic and faltering momentum, an ever deepening ever more forceful current of historical ‘becoming’, which, by the time it struck bottom, had become a torrent sweeping all before it. History was the focus of his writing not in the sense of a discipline or a field of problems and concerns, but as the great achievement of modern European culture, to be protected and cherished by critical and philosophical thought.67
History, in this perspective, is time given meaning by culture, and is thus something with which culture can actively and consciously interact. Bakhtin’s role in this interaction demonstrates a medievalist perspective. He would not have considered himself a medievalist nor would he, given the time of his writing, be able to fruitfully interact with what is considered medievalism today. Nevertheless, Bakhtin strongly emphasizes the negative aspects of modernity,68 stating that medieval, festive laughter “expresses the point of view of the whole world,” while “the pure satire of the modern times” causes laughter in which “the wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed.”69
Thus, Bakhtin originates the true essence of laughter in the Middle Ages, which demonstrated a wholeness of comic aspect lacking from his contemporary culture. As such, he demonstrates a sense of longing and nostalgia together with a wish for a return to an idealised
65
Bakhtin, 25.
66
Bakhtin, 25.
67Ken Hirschkop, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Historical Becoming in Language, Literature and Culture.” In The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical, and Psychological Perspectives. Vol 9. Edited by Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. 145. Print.
68Dominick LaCapra. “Carnival and Carnivalisation.” In Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin. Edited by Caryl
Emerson. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999. 243. Print.
69
vision of the Middle Ages.
For Bakhtin, then, there are two distinct ideas of time. Firstly, there is the cumulative time, which is the time that bears down on us from the past and carries with it historical weight; secondly, there is the ahistorical Carnival, a timeless moment of play that has its prime (and even original) expression in the medieval period. Much like Huizinga, Bakhtin gives play a place of central importance to the concept of culture. However, Bakhtin not only identifies Carnival as an abstract concept of timeless play but also proposes the carnivalesque as its direct expression in culture. Much like Runia’s and Ankersmit’s past as a protuberance into the present, an instance of the carnivalesque is a direct expression of Carnival as a whole, and thus stands in a metonymical relationship to it.70 Just as the carnivalesque is a localised expression of Carnival as a whole, so is laughter a direct experience of the carnivalesque in writing. Laughter thus becomes similar to Runia’s fremdkörper or Ankersmit’s traveller to a foreign land, being something that is not the past itself but which can still provoke an experience of a past. Thus, in order to fully understand how the concept of play may be vital to an experience of history, the experience of laughter and its relationship to this process must be examined.
Helmuth Plessner provides an excellent description of the subjective experience of laughter in his book Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. His analysis of the experience of laughter centres around the concept of the eccentric position. The eccentric position is the term that Plessner gives to the specific relation that human beings have to their world,71 which he typified as “a relation of himself to himself [sich . . . sich] (or, to put it precisely, of him to himself).”72
The returning issue for Plessner is that human beings have bodies that can be consciously controlled, but at the same time these bodies are physically included in a larger world
70
Bakhtin 149.
71
Helmuth Plessner. Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. Trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 36. Print.
72
that is mostly out of an individual’s control.73 The key relationship here is similar to Ankersmit's mention of Aristotle, in that Plessner argues for a continuity between person, body, and world. Plessner describes this relation by stating that “here I am separated from the 'outer' world, not by an immediate layer, which I, as a separate entity, live through and 'comprehend' from within, but as myself a piece of the external world, somewhere in a room or on the street.”74
Recurring in his argument is a tension between separation (humans as intellectual entities locked away in a Cartesian ivory tower from the physical world) and connection (humans as physical entities inseparably entrenched in the physical world). His solution to the problem is to reject Cartesian dualism, and to adopt a position of triadism, where “man's existence in the world is determined by the relation to his body, that the understanding of human nature is bound to the possibility of expression as a unity of intellectual, affective, and physical components.”75
In this relationship between person and body, where the person usually controls the body, both laughing and crying are unique exceptions that alter the relationship momentarily. Of laughing and crying (though hereafter the focus will be on laughter) Plessner states that in order to understand these, they must be kept “free from the usual separations into sharply contrasted regions of physical and psychological objectivity,” as these concern a “matter of human affairs, which take place in the domain of the human experience of life, of the behaviour of man to man and of man to world.”76
As a result, this requires that we “proceed from man as a whole, and not some particular aspect which can be detached from the whole in quasi-independent fashion, like body, soul, mind, or social unit.”77
This is important to emphasise because in laughter we see the interaction of the intellectual with the physical. To begin with, laughter requires the intellectual, as it is a response to the world around the individual78 yet equally laughter is the loss of control, as the physical body
overrules the intellectual mind.79 Thus, laughter, as the subject’s direct experience of play, forms the link between the intellectual observation of the world and the physical experience of it. It is the process by which a reader can encounter an artefact and forgo that crust of interpretation that Ankersmit pointed out in order to experience it in the context of the relation of person to world.
For in what Plessner identifies as “true laughter,' an expression of the person in relation to an event in the world is encountered.80 As Bakhtin and Huizinga’s theories connected time and timelessness to play and laughter, so does Plessner’s theory connect play to a realm outside of the normal order of things, one which is defined by imagination and the escape from reality.81 The relationship of person to body, however, he defines as being inextricably linked to the history from which both spring, as “'man' is not a being who understands himself in the same way among all peoples and all times; he is historically bound precisely in his original, everyday understanding.”82
For Plessner, language is strongly bound to its originating time, yet the meaning of words can only be revealed in “living social understanding,” which means that “the analysis of all human experience remains, despite its historical stamp, directed to 'everyday experience.”83
Therefore, a body, its relation to an individual, and its connection to the world exhibit a connection that is timeless and unique, while an individual’s understanding of those relationships can be highly culturally specific. Thus by exploring the relationship of person to body to world, the perspective on time of an individual’s culture can be explored; equally, in the act of laughing, by upending the relationship between person and body, the relationship between humanity's historically bounded experience and our intellectual relationship to it must also inevitably be altered.
Plessner’s ideas on laughter demonstrate what Plessner termed humanity’s eccentric position. Humankind, he suggests, is unique among all animals by being able to step out of itself in
