Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts

8. The Infinite Desire of Pearl

157 • • 8 • • The Infinite Desire of Pearl J. A. Jackson When Abba Zacharias was at the point of death, Abba Moses asked, “What do you see?” He said, “Is it not better to hold peace, my Father?” And Abba Moses said, “Yes, it is better to hold your peace, my child.” —Sayings of the Desert Fathers Theodore Bogdanos’s beautiful meditation on Pearl begins to define the inexpressibility of the poem’s theopoetics: “A fraction of historical time in a man’s life is engulfed in eternity; yet it suddenly expands and possesses eternity within itself—if only for a flashing moment of powerful vision.”1 The vision at the heart of the poem cannot be properly expressed because it can only be experienced, lived—in the world to come, of course, but in this one as well. My essay charts Pearl’s treatment of desire and its relation to this eschatological vision. I begin by focusing on the act of seeing, of vision. Focusing specifically on the Pearl-Maiden’s face, the Dreamer’s first optical gesture is a narcissistic one, an unconscious collapsing of the distance between the Maiden and himself. The Other who is visible, the poem will show, is precisely the other that can be effaced, absorbed into the same, though one must resist this temptation at all times. Through various rhetorical and didactic devices, the Maiden attempts to disrupt the Dreamer’s totalizing gestures. As a corrective, and as an assertion of her own alterity, the Maiden explicitly chastises the Dreamer for his unshakeable faith in his own vision. The Dreamer relies not only on his vision but also on his past knowledge of this Maiden. But this Maiden no longer remains his daughter, at least not the one 158 J. A. Jackson he knew, and she remains now, as ever before, entirely inassimilable. Thinking about paternity and futurity (perhaps even the eschatological ), Levinas names the obstacle facing the Dreamer: “The fact of seeing the possibilities of the other as your own possibilities, of being able to escape the closure of your identity and what is bestowed on you, toward something which is not bestowed on you and which nevertheless is yours—this is paternity....A future beyond my own being” (EI 70). The Dreamer’s self-constructed paternity, however, is situated only in his past and thus can offer him no vision of the future. The problem of vision, then, reveals itself as a problem of desire for the Dreamer, and so to offer him a corrective, the Maiden frames much of the discussion around desire. In the Dreamer one finds an egoic, narcissistic desire. He desires an Other of his own making. His is a desire not for the Other out of a duty to the Other, a loss of one’s self to the Other, but a desire of the Other only for himself. The Maiden, I argue, rather than rejecting desire altogether, attempts to resituate the Dreamer’s desire. This new desire is founded upon a structure of infinite substitution, wherein one desires to serve the Other who counts more than oneself. This structure is realized, I argue, in the liturgical procession of the brides of the Lamb, where the Dreamer witnesses each bride offering her place to every Other bride, giving up her own place in the procession for the Other. This liturgical structure of infinite substitution is the anagogical Church incarnate and acts as a response to the various theological questions throughout the poem—theo-ontological questions, questions of justice, questions of human relations. An explicit appropriation of the eschatological, Pearl visualizes an agape based not solely on undifferentiated love, but on what Levinas will identify as a radical asymmetrical relationship of substitution (BPW 90–91). Eschatological expectation, we come to find out in Pearl, is the prophetic naming of an infinite one-for-the-other, a response, a submission, a meeting with my neighbor to which I am always already late. Rather than simply naming divine being as such, the poem depicts an otherwise than being, named as the Kingdom of God itself. This is a kingdom The Infinite Desire of Pearl 159 composed of individual beings engaged in an infinite substitutionary relationship, a relationship where each individual utters an infinite “after you” to every Other individual. The poem treats the personal (each individual Other) and the...