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  • "Wanton Recollection":The Idolatrous Pleasures of Beowulf*
  • Thomas A. Prendergast

I remember even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things that I wish to forget.1

One of the Central Controversies in current literary criticism is also an ancient one—whether the value of literature lies in its didacticism or its figurative language and pleasurable content.2 This dichotomous way of thinking has found expression in postmodern and neo-Marxist attacks on modernist affirmations of aesthetic pleasure, which, these critics argue, idolizes the work of art. In The Scandal of Pleasure, Wendy Steiner diagnoses such concerns as, at the very least, belated: "One need not deny or deconstruct aesthetic pleasure at this point in order to prevent people from falling into idolatry. . . . Who would advocate art for art's sake anymore?"3 Yet the very fact that her manifesto offers a trenchant response to critics like Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson (who decry the "idolatry" and "fetishism" inherent in aesthetic pleasure) suggests the currency of this ongoing debate.4

Just how much is at stake in such debates can be seen in recent discussions about the pleasurable content of Beowulf. What lies behind assertions like "Beowulf has a bad reputation" and Beowulf's "reputation among general readers is, of course, dreadful" seems to be an anxiety that the marginalization of early medieval studies results from the lack of pleasure that readers take in the Anglo-Saxon work.5 But attempts to reintroduce the pleasures of the text frequently betray ambivalences about affirming a less rarefied reading of the work; thus James Earl and Allen Frantzen argue that in order to rescue the reputation of the Old English poem, critics need to challenge those who believe Beowulf to be a mere "adventure or fantasy story," or a "cliché."6 Both scholars offer, instead, compelling (and sophisticated) readings that attempt to raise [End Page 129] the level of discourse about the poem by asking the reader to appreciate the extent to which our understanding of the poem is based on a critical tradition that treats the poem as "serious" literature.

On one level, such conflicted responses to Beowulf emerge from contemporary debates about what kind of texts "deserve" attention—those more pleasurable texts that respond to popular tastes or those more didactic texts that yield serious readings. Curiously enough, critics have, for the most part, overlooked the extent to which Beowulf inscribes its own cultural and ethical ambivalences about how it expects readers to respond to it. For even as the work's narrator cautions against the idolatrous seductions of violence, the work unfolds as an idolatrous memorialization of the pleasures of violence—a pleasure compulsively repeated in the very language of the text.

This last contrast highlights a significant difference between contemporary anxieties about the reception of Beowulf and anxieties expressed within Beowulf itself. For if, as Laura Mulvey asserts, current criticism "destroy[s] . . . pleasure or beauty" in order to demystify the text, early medieval critics attempted to destroy pleasure by encouraging a forgetting of the text itself.7 Pleasure, at least earthly pleasure, was seen as a distraction from the pleasure that one was to take in God. Certainly this kind of concern led the fifth-century monk, John Cassian, to lament that his didactic, divine meditations were giving way to more seductive, secular images: "my mind is filled with those songs of the poets so that even at the hour of prayer it is thinking about those trifling fables, and the stories of battles with which from its earliest infancy it was stored by its childish lessons: and when singing Psalms or asking forgiveness of sins either some wanton recollection of the poems intrudes itself or the images of heroes fighting presents itself before the eyes, and an imagination of such phantoms is always tricking me and does not suffer my soul to aspire to an insight into things above."8 These images that distract him from meditations on the divine were so troubling and offensive to early ecclesiastics that patristic psychology had categorized them as symptomatic of uncleanness (immunditia)—(as the Abbot Nesteros tells Cassian) a form of fornication.9 Yet, like...

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