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  • Plague, Panic Space, and the Tragic Medieval Household
  • D. Vance Smith* (bio)

Death is just a place that we have looked too deeply at, not into.

—Iain Crichton Smith, “Argument”

What is death? A tragic mask.

—Epictetus

Tragedy, Michel de Certeau says, describes the passage from a spatial order to a temporal series.1 This somewhat cryptic remark sums up exactly what Freudian tragedy and Boethian tragedy (at least, the version of it that Chaucer understands) have in common. Tragedy follows the transformation of a place that may be topographical, political, mnemonic, or psychological into a space that is threatened by and involved in the flux or oblivion of time. Chaucer’s juxtaposed definitions of tragedy in Boece (2.Pr.2), his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, show us its two termini, the one in which it is “the dedes of Fortune, that . . . overturneth the realmes of greet nobleye”—the destruction of the place of privilege—and its corollary, where tragedy is “a dite of a prosperitee for a tyme, that endith in wrecchidnesse”—the destruction of that privilege as a function of time.2 These [End Page 367] two definitions also cover the change from the classical conception of tragedy to the medieval or, more precisely, the Chaucerian conception, which concentrates on the loss of “prosperitee” and place in time.3 Even more to the point, these coinciding yet divergent definitions cover the expanse of the household, an expanse both vast and intimate like the focus of tragedy. As seen in the guise of tragedy, the household is situated between a place that is timeless, one that cannot and need not be remembered, and a place that unfolds in the vicissitudes of time, one in which its idea is what is remembered so that it seems familiar, domestic, indebted to time. In order to understand more precisely how the household is also a place of memory, we need to consider how, along with tragedy, it is a place both frighteningly vast and indicatively intimate. Just as history is the nightmare of tragedy, so is tragedy the nightmare of the household.

Freud’s deep indebtedness to classical tragedies, most obviously to Oedipus, encourages us to see his work on the initiation of the subject as both a kind of tragic development and an entrance into history. We begin our lives, as in a tragedy, in an imaginary unity of benevolent, all-powerful beings whose kindly disposition toward us is unrecognized because we do not see any difference between ourselves and the principles that govern the world. As we recede further from that imaginary unity, we also lose our direct intuition of it as a place we can inhabit, indeed as a place at all. It becomes the utopia we can never quite imagine adequately enough to live in again as we enter into history, into the plots of tragedy, into our dissolution by time, in which we can never again find ourselves.4 The disappearance of a place where similitudes and originals coexisted, where property, objects, and selves could all inhabit the same site, provokes the work of memory, which seeks to undo the flux of time by locating the place where things no longer disappear in exchange or consumption. Memory is not only a work of imagination, of representing things that have vanished, but also the invention of a place to which we can return at will, a place that contains everything we want habitually, everything we want to have. The corollary of de Certeau’s observation about the orders that Freudian tragedy transforms—the transition from spatial to temporal—is that it afflicts us with the responsibility of history, precipitating us into the precariousness of a time in which we cannot apprehend static organization precisely because we also lose an unmediated relation to space itself.5 Perhaps the most important task that memory performs is not the recall of particular details, [End Page 368] the objects of thought, but the persistent and urgent fascination with the very idea of place, location, as the lost possibility of pure spatial organization. A recurrent image of the structure of memory in classical and medieval mnemonic treatises is the house...

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