Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law

Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law George Edmondson University of California, Los Angeles I I begin with a simple, telling fact: in five sections, thirty-one chapters, and a little more than a thousand pages, the new Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature mentions Pearl, generally regarded as a fourteenth -century masterpiece, a mere two times, both of them in passing.1 It is hard to know what to make of such an omission. One can, of course, accept it as a consequence of two of the History’s stated projects: ‘‘to encourage new work in neglected areas and on neglected, or still unedited , texts,’’ and ‘‘to help ease the bottleneck that has formed, in literary criticism and curricular design, around late fourteenth-century England .’’2 These are obviously laudable goals. Even so, one gets the sense that the History’s ‘‘disappearing’’ of Pearl, a work once claimed as a ‘‘discover [y] of the New Criticism,’’3 signifies more than just historicism’s I am grateful to Christopher Cannon, V. A. Kolve, H. N. Lukes, and the anonymous readers of SAC for their helpful comments at various stages in the development of this essay. Versions of this essay were presented to audiences at Haverford College and the Thirty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University , Kalamazoo, Michigan. I wish to thank the members of those audiences, in particular Kim Benston, Ann Astell, and Justin Jackson, for their valuable questions and commentary. 1 The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The two references are as follows: ‘‘[T]he Pearlpoet Englishes the Bible’’ (p. 315) and ‘‘There is no more creatively biblical codex in English literature than British Library, Cotton Nero a. x., with its use of the Apocalypse in Pearl, and its two homilies on different beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, Patience and Cleanness’’ (p. 479). Notice that the first reference is a prefatory remark about the second. 2 Ibid., pp. xi–ii. 3 Charles Muscatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer, in his Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), p. 87. 29 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER effort to redress past neglect. Appearing to accept, at face value, the idea that Pearl ‘‘seems so completely poetry . . . and so little history,’’4 the editor and contributors of the History end up marking the poem in much the same way that the poem itself marks the pearl: as an ‘‘indivisible remainder,’’ neither wholly assimilable nor entirely forgettable, against and around which their own order of medieval English literature must be written.5 And they are right: Pearl, a late-medieval text typically embraced by modern readers for its transhistorical reach, does indeed disrupt medieval English literature as the History envisions it: localized, politicized, illegible ‘‘except as part of transmissive processes . . . that form part of other and greater histories.’’6 But does this mean that, in order to be a ‘‘good’’ student of medieval English literature, circa 2004, one has to leave Pearl behind? To his credit, John Bowers has tried to resolve this question in his fine study, The Politics of ‘‘Pearl.’’7 The range of Bowers’s scholarship, encompassing everything from economics to theology to the intricacies of Ricardian court culture, is impressive, and he does as thorough (and convincing) a job of contextualizing Pearl as seems possible. Yet in its very efforts to rehabilitate Pearl along historicist lines—arguing, for example , that the poem uses biblical parables to engage with contemporary politics, or that the pearl-maiden represents both Richard II’s dead queen, Anne, and his child bride, Isabelle—Bowers’s work necessarily retreats from what is arguably most affecting about Pearl: the fact that its work of mourning, whether understood as personal or impersonal, factual or allegorical, exceeds its immediate object. Bowers may be right: Pearl may indeed have been written to memorialize Anne as a queen of heaven while simultaneously praising the virginal Isabelle. But the moment the poem adopts its central figurative strategy—the moment it translates its mourned figure into the metaphor of the pearl, the moment...