Kristeva Fatalism and Textuality
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Transcript of Kristeva Fatalism and Textuality
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
This essay will look at three Old Norse texts which, despite their
significant historical disparity both of composition and manuscript
compilation, as well as their formal and topical heterogeneity may
nevertheless be read sui generis for their treatment of fatalism and
their reflexive preoccupation with modes of artistic production in the
creation of the textual object. They are, the Vǫluspá, a vatic
cosmogony written in the fornyrðislag metre characteristic of Eddaic
mythological verse; Nornagests þáttr, a framed narrative detailing
heroic action of the Migration period and sharing the dynastic topoi of
the MHG Nibelungenlied and the ON Vǫlsunga saga; and the
Darraðarljóð, the supernatural lausavísur, also in fornyrðislag, that
irrupt the 157th episode of Brennu-Njáls saga.1 Not only are these
texts divergent between themselves, they are significantly discrete
from surrounding material in their manuscript contexts; particularly
Nornagests þáttr and the Darraðarljóð. The Vǫluspá, as both
cosmogony and eschatalogy describes an enclosed teleological
system, which stands before, wraps around and underscores the rest
of the poems in the Codex Regius: it provides an epistemological
framework for the texts which follow, as well as to take the measure
of their ontology.2 Nornagests þáttr lodges an example of
fornaldarsaga narrative within the konungasaga of Óláf Tryggvasson,
and is but one of over thirty such interpolated þættir (threads,
strands, tales) that comprise the ‘Longest Saga’ found in the
Flateyjarbók MS.3 The Darraðarljóð similarly forms a quasi-
independent semiotic loop: its composition long predates that of the
1 Vǫluspá, preserved in Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to) and in Hauksbók (Codex AM 544 4to); all references to Dronke’s edition (Oxford, 1997) as ‘V’ with stanza number(s) in parenthesis in text. Nornagests þáttr, intercalated in Óláfs saga Tryggvassonar in the Flateyjarbók MS (GkS 1005 fol); all references to Vigfússon-Unger edition (Christiania, 1860) as ‘Ng’ with page-number(s) in parenthesis in text. Darraðarljóð, intercalated in Brennu-Njáls saga MSS Reykjabók, Oddabók, Mǫðruvallabók and Gráskinnuauki; all references to Íslenzk Fórnrit edition (Rekjavík, 1954) as ‘ÍF’, volume, and page number(s) in parenthesis in text.2 Heidegger writes that ‘[m]an’s dwelling depends on an upward-looking, measure-taking’ of the span between the earth and the sky in ‘...Poetically Man Dwells...’ trans. Hofstadter (1984).3 See Carol Clover, Medieval Saga, (Ithaca, 1982), 81-83.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
Njála text and its integrity with that narrative is questionable, while
the febrility of its drives seems radically to propel it through and
beyond the potential of symbolic discourse, as well as the domain of
the sign. To paraphrase Derrida, its invagination within the textual
object creates ‘an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the
outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as
it is limitless.’4
These latter two units (Nornagests þáttr and Darraðarljóð),
embedded within textual frameworks of largely coherent, more or
less plausible, predominantly descriptive pseudo-historical prose
(Óláfs saga Tryggvassonar and Brennu-Njáls saga) enact a mythic
reflex (and reflux), enfolding (and flowing back to) a plane of fatalism
consisting before and behind historical time as it obtains in saga-
narrative. Such points of contact and rupture between the discrete
realms of linear causal time and fate—which has no operation as
such, but to exist through itself, an always already, and ineluctable,
given—witness the shattering of commonsense representation and
give place to a mode of artistic reflexivity in which the skeletal
structure of the signifying practice is suddenly, if ephemerally,
thrown into relief. Insofar as these structurally sub-dependent units
(þáttr and –ljóð) trace out the contours of an exchange with uncanny
agents of fatalism (nornir and valkyrjur) they are essentially
transgressive. Yet Gestr’s sublime trajectory underscores the limits
of an ideologically normative discourse in which the ethics of
heroism, martial prowess and dynastic virtue are valorised, even as
the social and political value of narrative in itself is enshrined by the
device of oral performance within which the semiotic loop is framed.
Dǫrruðr’s experience of voyeuristic abjection on the periphery of the
gynæceum at Caithness is stretched across the boundary between
the mundane and fantastic; a site through which the oscillating drives
of desire and disgust are drawn. As the weaving song unfolds it
4 ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7 no. 11, (Autumn, 1980), 55-81, 59; from Glyph 7(Spring, 1980).
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
radically disrupts the mechanism of representation: the terror of the
real overwhelmingly threatens the imaginary-symbolic continuum as
the Death-drive is cathected through a moment of production into a
product by which it cannot be accommodated. In the Vǫluspá the
disembodied vǫlva stages a traumatic parturition from a gestative
state to the genesis of earthly phenomena and participation in the
symbolic order, describing a process by which signification itself is
inaugurated.
Psychoanalytic theory will provide the intellectual framework of
this essay. Concepts—such as ‘sublimation’, ‘abjection’, the
‘maternal object’, ‘the symbolic’, ‘the real’ and the ‘objet petit a’—
derived from Lacan, and developed by Kristeva, will be employed in
order to unpeel some of the tissues of meaning that cohere in
representations of fatalism in the primary texts. Moreover these
concepts will provide particular insights into the way such
representations reflect the very process and product of
representation back upon itself. What seems to be at stake, when
fatalism is adduced in Old Norse literature, is nothing less than
‘meaning’ in its totality, for every member of the discursive matrix:
whether composer, audience, or critic. Lacanian analysis provides a
powerful tool for understanding how such meaning is generated and
recirculated, for it is a theory in which language, before all, gives
place to the subject. Furthermore, as developed by Kristeva, its
interdisciplinary potential has been demonstrated as the
psychoanalytic model can be seen to cut across methodological and
experiential boundaries, whether social, political, historical,
theological, ontological, or poetic. It is an implicit aim of this paper to
articulate these registers and their interpenetrations as they bear
upon the creation of the textual object. In what follows then
psychoanalytic concepts will briefly be introduced and explained and
tested against the primary textual evidence. It is hoped that the
theoretical and literary discourses may be engaged in collaboration:
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
for texts are not the dumb objects of analytic practice but may be
regarded as witnesses that are themselves capable of illuminating
the analytic process in which they participate.
The Vǫluspá provides an auspicious point of departure for it is a
poem, in its early phase, of beginnings: an opening and unfolding of
the cosmos. Yet when this composition is viewed in its historical
context—now generally agreed to have been around the turn of the
eleventh century—it is possible to witness the dialectical tension from
which these extraordinary verses spring.5 As Germanic polytheism
was systematically displaced by the advent of Christianity at the
dawn of the new—and twilight of the old—millennium, participants of
Scandinavian culture experienced both loss and renewal; energies
reflected in the cosmogonic and eschatological patterns of the
Vǫluspá.6 Implicit in this dynamic and giving place to the very media
which enable us to assess it are the adoption of the Roman alphabet
and the institution of scriptoria which the Church had brought.
Ironically it was only by dint of conversion to Christianity, as a religion
of the Book, that material preconditions for the textual expression of
the pagan mythos were satisfied.7 This dialectic is tautened by the
historical gaps between the composition of the Vǫluspá and its
textual emergence in the sources now extant; first in the Codex
Regius MS (GKS 2365 4to) c.1270 and then in the Hauksbók MS
(Codex AM 544 4to) c.1330.8 Thus the extent to which Christian
doctrine has impinged upon native beliefs as available to us in these
texts is still an open site of conjecture and debate.9
5 On dating Vǫluspá, see John Lindow, ‘Mythology and Mythography’ in Clover and Lindow (eds.), Critical Guide, (Toronto, 1985; 2005), 48.6 On the millenial conversion period, see Jenny Jochens, ‘Late and Peaceful’ in Speculum, vol.74, no.3 (Jul., 1999), 621-655.7 On the advent of alphabetic literacy in Iceland, see Judy Quinn, ‘From orality to literacy’ in Clunies-Ross (ed.), Old Icelandic literature and society, (Cambridge, 2000), 30-31.8 On dating the Codex Regius see Harris, ‘Eddic Poetry’, (Toronto, 1985; 2005), 75. On Hauksbók, see Sveinsson, Dating the Icelandic sagas, (London, 1958), 12. 9 A brief summary of some key positions in this debate is provided by Lindow in ‘Mythology and Mythography’ (1985; 2005), 40-41.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
Julia Kristeva observes that ‘crises’ of ‘social structures and
their ideological, coercive, and necrophilic manifestations…have
occurred at the dawn and decline of every mode of production,’
arguing that such crises are the midwives to an exhaustive turn in
the signifying practice.10 With the paradigm shifts—religious, cultic,
and textual—transpiring around the millenial period, and
repercussing throughout succeeding centuries, Icelandic self-
expression within the new institution and technology of literature was
fringed with the trauma of parturition. The Mirror Stage identified by
Lacan is the phase during which the infant develops understanding of
the relation duelle, not only between the body and the Ego, but
between the imaginary and the real:
[the] jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans
stage...would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic
matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is
objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before
language restores it, in the universal, its function as subject.11
The moment of subject-formation precipitates abjection from the
hitherto dyadic relationship with the maternal object: where ‘[t]here
is language instead of the good breast...[d]iscourse is being
substituted for maternal care.’12 To enter discourse then is to be
driven at once by desire and disgust: the subject is driven against its
abjection from the maternal object by desire, but at once militates, in
disgust, against the dissolution of its subjectivity that such a return
would entail.13 Through the Vǫluspá one may trace a trajectory of
parturition, from the primordial pre-symbolic to object-relations, the
preliminary acquisition of meaning, and the issue of textuality as a
bounded set.
10 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Roudiez, (New York, 1984), 15; Kristeva argues for a particularly explosive manifestation of this tendency in modernity but acknowledges that it punctuates cultural history all the way back to Homer and Pindar.11 Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York, 1977), 1-7, (2).12 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York, 1982), 45.13
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
The language of negation that structures the third stanza reads
like the primordial ur-state that obtains a priori language-acquisition:
a formless void, the pre-symbolic semiotic chora:14
Ár var alda, It was in the early ages
þar er Ymir byggði: when Ymir made his dwelling
vara sandr né sær there was not sand nor sea
né svalar unnir. nor chill waves.
Iǫrð fannz æva Earth was not to be found
né upphiminn: nor above it heaven
gap var ginnunga, a gulf was there of gaping voids
en gras hvergi, and grass nowhere
(V 3)
Interwoven with and seeding these images of primordiality are tropes
of gestation and fashioning:
Áðr Burs synir Before Burr’s sons
biǫðom um ypðo, lifted up seashores
þeir er miðgarð they who moulded
mæran skópo. glorious Miðgarðr.
(V 4)
Chronological priority, suggested by the preposition Áðr, segues into
the creation-image in the preterite, so that cosmogonic inertia is
evoked through a backward glance upon events that have yet to—
although foreordained to—come into being from the vatic perspective
of an ‘I’ whose vision encompasses the patterns of fate and time in
their totality. The translation ‘moulded’ for skópo is somewhat
reductive for skapa (v, inf.) has a semantic plurality that cuts through
and shapes events on the physical, linguistic, and fatalistic planes.15
14 Kristeva adapts this term from the Platonic Timæus. In her discourse the chora is the vessel through which the drives, undefined and inarticulate, pour and are emptied out: ‘a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’, Revolution, 25-30, (25); see also Desire in Language, trans. Gora, Jardine, Roudiez, (1981; 1989), 133.15 For examples see Cleasby-Vígfusson, (Oxford, 1847), 537-38.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
The metaphor for the drawing up and shaping of Miðgarðr as a
shoreline against the primordial waveless Ginnungagap, describes
the moment of articulation where formlessness resolves into form,
and this shaping and measure-taking, of space, meaning, and fate as
the ‘middle-yard’ stakes out the teleological enclosure of human
agency.
Ursula Dronke observes that the Vǫluspá synthesizes three
independent myths of origin: ‘that of the giant birth of the world
tree...that of the lifting of the first earth out of the primordial ocean...
[and] that of the primordial giant-corpse from which the earth and
sky were fashioned.’16 Returning later to the topos of the world-ash
Yggdrasill, let us first make the transition between the second and
third of these mythic metaphors. The Codex Regius text of the
Vǫluspá, in fact, does not elaborate the conceit by which corporeal
details of the giant Ymir’s physical existence provide the prima
materia for the cosmogony.17 The primary extant evidence of this
myth is provided by the Gylfaginning section of the Snorra Edda:
Ór Ymis holdi From Ymir’s flesh
var jǫrð of skǫpuð was earth created,
en ór sveita sjár, and from blood, sea;
bjǫrg ór beinum, rocks of bones,
baðmr ór hári, trees of hair,
en ór hausi himinn; and from his skull, the sky.
en ór hans brám And from his eyelashes
gerðu blíð regin the joyous gods made
Miðgarð manna sonum, Migard for men’s sons,
en ór hans heila and from his brains
váru þau hin harðmóðgu were those cruel
16 The Poetic Edda: Mythological Poems, 2 vols., (Oxford, 1997) II, 32.17 See Gabriel Turville-Petre, who squeamishly sees this as one of ‘the grotesque motives of pagan mythology’ in Origins of Icelandic Literature, (Oxford, 1953), 61.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
ský ǫll of skǫpuð.18 clouds all created.19
Ymir, the monadic ur-form of humanity and first in the race of
hrímþursa (frost-giants) is himself generated by a synthetic
contamination of the Ginnungagap with the heat of Muspell and the
cold of Niflheim.20 The first phases of this cosmogony then are
essentially gestative, consisting in the pure motility of physics and
the biological outgrowth of physicality as earthly phenomena that are
mapped onto and through the anatomical model. The mode is
anaclitic: the universe, in the full range of its natural manifestation—
geological, arboreal, marine, celestial and meterological—inheres in
the totality of the monadic body-model.21 It is through parturition
from this totality that the potential for significance itself is realised.
The dyadic prototype is provided by Yggdrasill, the world-ash:
the structural axis of the universe and parent of life:
Ask veit ek standa, An Ash I know there stands,
heitir Yggdrasill, Yggdrasill is its name,
hár baðmr, ausinn a tall tree, showered
hvítaauri. with shining loam.
(V 19)
Yggdrasill’s species, the Ash, links its materiality with that of the Ask
ok Emblo discovered by the three Æsir of the seventeenth stanza:
Fundo á landi They found on land,
lítt megandi little capable
Ask ok Emblo Ash and Embla,
ørlǫglausa. without destiny.
(V 17)
18 Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, (Oxford, 1982), 12.19 Edda, trans. Faulkes, (London, 1987; 2003), 13.20 See Edda, (1982), 10, ll.10-15.21 On anaclisis, see Kristeva, ‘Place Names’ in Desire in Language, (1980), 271-94 (280-86).
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
The raw material of humanity, here in its unpotentiated pre-symbolic
state is of a piece with the material conditions of Yggdrasill, the
parent-object. Yet the Ash and the Embla are abjected from the
centrality focussed upon the parent, stranded upon a shore which
demarcates the outermost extent of Miðgarðr’s spatial limits.
Immediately supervening upon this splitting off from dyadic integrity
is the extraordinary sequence describing language-acquisition and
subject-formation through which the object-relations of the cosmos
are resolved by restorative entry into the symbolic order:
Ǫnd þau né átto, Breath they had not,
óð þau né hǫfðo, spirit they had not,
lá né læti no film of flesh nor cry of voice,
né líto góða. nor comely hues.
Ǫnd gaf Óðinn, Breath Óðinn gave,
óð gaf Hœnir, spirit Hœnir gave,
lá gaf Lóðurr film of flesh Lóðurr gave
ok líto góða. and comely hues.
(V 18)
The symmetrical antithesis describes, and re-scribes, the state and
process of lack and its fulfillment: of abjection and restoration. The
human subject, thus rendered, understands itself through its relation
to, and difference from, the parent stock. Its separation and
invagination in a ‘film of flesh’ or limit (lá) constitutes and reseals its
division and release from the anaclitic phase, as breath or animus
(ǫnd) and vitality or being-there (óð) confer autonomy. This is now a
separate subject in a world of objects, yet one bound up in the very
grain of its texture with the biological materiality of its maternal
origins. The restorative function of entry into the symbolic redresses
the condition of lack (ørlǫglausa). The human subject may now
participate in the Law of the Father and address itself to the
signifying apparatuses through which human thought, activity, and
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
language are constituted. Bound up in this transition is the
prescription of fate as an ontological imperative.
The nineteenth and twentieth stanzas dealing with this
operation perform a syntagmatic abstraction that mirrors an
estranged apprehension of time:
Ask veit ek standa,
heitir Yggdrasill,
hár baðmr ausinn
hvítaauri,
þaðan koma döggvar
þærs í dala falla,
stendr æ yfir grœnn
Urðarbrunni.
Þaðan koma meyjar,
margs vitandi,
þrjár ór þeim sæ
er und þolli stendr.
Urð hétu eina,
aðra Verðandi,
- skáro á skíði -
Skuld ina þriðjo.
Þær lǫg lǫgðo,
þær líf kuro
alda bǫrnum,
ørlǫg seggja.
(V 19-20)
In thus far tacitly re-ordering the stanzaic sequence to nineteen-
seventeen-eighteen I have deliberately situated Yggdrasill a priori the
Ask ok Emblo of the seventeenth stanza. However in the surface
structure of the text, the parturition sequence occurs before the
description of Yggdrasill, the parent-object. This felicitously reflects
the sequence of the Mirror Stage model developed by Lacan, for it is
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
indeed necessary for the subject to be abjected from the anaclitic
phase as a precondition of the recognition of its parent as an extrinsic
object-relation. The text performs a further analepsis, however, in
deferring the description of Urðarbrunni (Urðr’s well) and its function
until the twentieth stanza. The well of fate nourishes the world-ash,
parent-tree of human life. Thus the raw material from which the
human form is hewn has ab aevo drawn vitality and growth from the
liquor of fatalism. The biological metaphor thus structures the
profoundly radical integrity of fatalism with the affairs of human
agency. Furthermore, in restructuring the timeflow, the double
analepsis reflects the human recognition of destiny. The pattern of
fate is the abstract ur-plane consisting beyond the limit of language
and cognition, yet impinging upon and protracting the events of
history and ‘reality’, as understood by commonsense empiricism.
Human recognition of fate plays strange tricks with time: the
discovery of the foreordination of the patterns of causality—which
consist both before time and outside of time and yet determine how
and to which extent time itself will elapse for the subject—is
predominantly a post facto experience. We may feel the hand of
history on our shoulder, but its destinal operation is never entirely
clear, in an imagistic totality, until the thread of life itself is cut.
The appearance of the nornir, Urðr, Skulðr and Verðanði
completes the textual set which describes the cosmogonic phase and
which occupies approximately the first third of the poem. Their
textual determination of the fate of Miðgarðr (skáro á skíði)
completes the trajectory of creation and gives place to the continuum
of history by investing it with significance. It is they who consolidate
and fulfil the totality of meaning and finalise restorative entry into the
symbolic order (Þær lǫg lǫgðo / þær líf kuro / alda bǫrnum, / ørlǫg
seggja). Fatalism thus comprises a form of linguistic and textual
agency, as the teleological continuum, in its entirety, from the first
resolution of the formless Ginnungagap to the eschatalogical twilight
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
at Ragnarǫk, is patterned by a single utterance in the form of a runic
inscription at the dawn of cosmic time. Yet the operation of fate
resists linguistic and cognitive apprehension, and instead forms part
of the mechanism of ‘the real’. ‘The real’, in the Lacanian sense is ‘a
traumatic residue which infuses speaking subjects with the anxiety
that language is not “everything” but rather breached by a gaping
hole.’22 It is precisely that which is outside the symbolic, and so
outside “reality” as it is represented by the subject to itself.23
The gap thus manifested in the symbolic is conceptualised by
Lacan as the objet a: ‘an abstraction of all that underlies our
obsessive fabrication of objects...in its imaginary dimension, an
endless lure for the subject; at the same time it is a position set up
for us by the deceits of the symbolic, a presence summoned to plug
the absence behind it.’24 The objet a, then, is a vortex at the centre
of the symbolic, endlessly stimulating an imperative to generate that
which might mask and seal over this void, and so occlude the
terrifying penumbra of the real. Such subrogation is endemic in
culture—indeed throughout social practice in general—providing a
basis for metaphor and imagery and driving, in essence, the very
creation of the textual object. An element of contradiction thus
obtains in the textual reflexivity with which the Vǫluspá—as well as
the next two texts under discussion—frames the topic of fatalism:
their expression of the mechanism of fate in terms of, and as, a
significative object or textual event, both excavates and fills in that
space in which fate itself is inscribed and worked through.
22 Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions, (Stanford, 2001), 31; citing Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 25-26.23 ‘Increasingly, Lacan becomes preoccupied with the incapacity of the symbolic to take account of what is there in reality; this lack in the symbolic both reflects and generates a sense that reality has a profoundly traumatic dimension which exceeds language. Thus although the symbolic orchestrates all the resources of language, it also itself stands in a relation of negation, and contradiction, to the real’, Kay, ibid, 29-30.24 Kay, ibid, 33.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
Nornagests þáttr survives in only one manuscript, the Flateyjarbók:
the most imposing textual object in the Old Icelandic corpus. Lavishly
illuminated (by Old Norse standards) and extending to over 220
single folio vellums, this is also a manuscript which is uniquely
privileged with a full codicological history.25 The compilatorial zeal
with which the kings’ sagas were copiously amplified—to the point,
practically, of the distortion of their narrative fabric—attests to and is
perhaps the high point of the antiquarian impulse animating the
Icelandic literary culture of the fourteenth century. With the
extensive intercalation of þættir into the larger textual frameworks of
the konungasǫgur, the scribe-compilators Jon prestr Þórðarson and
Magnús prestr Þórhallzson, under the aegis of the book’s patron Jonn
Hakonarson, performed the generous conservation of an extensive
range of material that would otherwise have been lost to obscurity;
including, and not limited to, Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Eiríks
saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga. That an acute awareness of the
shape and function of the textual object should have obtained during
the undertaking of such an ambitious cultural project is in no way
surprising. It is equally to be expected that such reflection would
work its way into the text itself. In marking out the limits of the
textual subset, and attempting its suture to the larger narrative
frame, the compilator(s) controlling the inclusion of Nornagests þáttr
foregrounded its textuality through tropes of authentication that
ironically disclose its outstanding artificiality.
In the manuscript witness the limits of the textual subset are
defined by its own rubrication—her hefr þaatt af NornaGesti—and
that of the following tale—þaatr Helga Þorissunar (Ng 346, 359).
Sidling up against these paratextual signifiers are the framing terms
of the text itself in which Gest is warmly brought into the circle of
Ólafr Tryggvasson’s court (Konungr tok honum uel) and the final
reflection upon this guest’s worth and the validity of his story (þotti
25 Codex Flatöiensis MS GkS 1005 fol. …
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
konungi ok mikit mark at sǫgum hans ok þotti sannazst um lifgada
hans sem hann sagde). The trajectory of Nornagests þáttr thus
describes an arc of great promise fulfilled and is lodged with a truth-
claim that belies the fantasmatic excesses of its heroic mythological
topoi. It is a narrative that fully embraces those characteristics
defined by Kristeva as inhering in le texte clos (‘the bounded text’):
for it is, ‘as ideologeme, closed and terminated in its very
beginnings.’26 The ‘ideologeme’ is ‘that intertextual function read as
“materialized” at the different structural levels of each text, and
which stretches along the entire length of its trajectory, giving it its
historical and social coordinates.’27 The difficulty remains of squaring
this ideologically normative anchorage with the circle of uncanny
diegesis that Gestr relates in his romantic account of the
fornaldarsaga narrative, and the acceptance of its truth-claim by
Ólafr Tryggvasson; a genuine historical character deposited within
and in relation to a patent fabrication.
In order to resolve this quandary it will be valuable to return to
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Within and beyond the textual and
paratextual markers already mentioned, which outline the limits of
the textual subset, is a framing trope which although only disclosed
in the final stages of the þáttr determines, in itself, the trajectory and
extent of Gest’s ontology. I refer of course to the vǫlurs’ prophecy,
and the candle as the object in which the fatal curse of the norn is
invested:
Kallar hon þa hatt ok ræidiliga ok bad hinar hætta sua godum ummælum
uit mig. Þuiat et skapa honum þat at hann skalæigi lifa leingr en kerti þat
brennr er upp er tendrat hea suæininum. Eftir þetta tok hin ellri uoluan
kertit ok slokti ok bidr modur mina uardueita ok kuæikia æigi fyrr en a
sidazsta degi lifs mins....Þa er ek er þat nu med mer roskinn madr fær
modir minn mer kerti þetta til uarduæitzslu. hefui ek suarar.
26 See ‘The Bounded Text’ in Desire in Language, (1981; 1989), 36-63, (41).27 Kristeva, ibid, 36.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
(Ng 358)
She called out fiercely and in anger, commanding them to desist in their
good prophecies for me, declaring instead that I should not live longer
than that candle shall burn. After this the eldest vǫlur took the candle and
snuffed it out and gave it to my mother for safekeeping, telling her not to
light it till the last day of my life. Once I had fully come of age, my mother
gave me the candle to look after. I have it with me now.
In Lacan’s seventh seminar (1959-60) he formulates a model of
sublimation as that fulfilment of jouissance that transpires in the
“zone between two deaths.”28 Sarah Kay writes that the ‘sublime
results from lethal destructiveness, and yet it also occludes the
reality of death, into the uncanny form of the victim’s preternatural
beauty or ethical significance.’29 The whole of Gest’s life—several
centuries of it—is suspended in the anticipation and holding at bay of
the death which will inevitably supervene upon the final extinction of
this enchanted candle. He thus occupies a charmed existence, which
is simultaneously, and continually, circumscribed by a deathly halo.
The conservation of this object thus enacts a displacement and
deferral of the real and gives place to the trajectory of sublimation in
which the ever-threatening aura of the death-drive is cathected and
redistributed into a symbolic-imaginary representation of superlative
magnificence.
Gest is unequivocally admitted to the inner sanctum of the
royal court where he evinces prowess and beauty: Konungr suarar.
Gestr muntu her uera huersu sem þu hæitir [‘the king said “you shall
be a guest here, whatever your name is”’]...Þrifligr madr ertu śegir
kongungr. Gestr sia uar diarfr j ordum ok mæiri en flestir menn adrir
sterkligr ok nokkuat hniginn j efra alldr [‘“You are a handsome man”,
said the king. Gest was forthright in speech, more so than previous
men, and strong and seemed older’] (Ng 346). His accomplishments,
28 First published as L’éthique de psychanalyse, (1959-60); translated as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge, 1992).29 Courtly Contradictions, (2001), 218.
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
at playing the harp and storytelling, are similarly valorized and he is
deemed, in all respects, a singular hirðmaðr: er honum skipat utar fra
gestum. Hann uar sidsamr madr ok latadr uel. uar hann ok
þokkasamr af flestum monnum ok virdizst uel. [‘he was seated away
from the other guests. He was a polite man and behaved well. He
was beloved of many and highly thought of’] (Ng 347). His noble
status is consolidated by the wager in which he proves that his
fragment of a golden saddle-ring—gold being so often the index of
valour in romance as in later saga literature—is of exemplary value
(allgott gull) (Ng 348). Having thus enshrined this character with a
full range of courtly virtues, and legitimated his authenticity the
stage is set for his own voice to take over the narrative and lodge its
mythic history within the larger textual frame: Þo uilium uer heyra
segir konungr med þui at þu hefir oss adr hæitit sǫgu þinne [‘“Now,”
said the king, “I’d like to hear the story of how you came by that gold
in your possession”] (Ng 349).
Nornagest’s affiliation with the population of the mythic
Nifelung-Vǫlsung dynasty (J þessi ferd uar med Sigurdi Hamundr
brodir hans ok Reginn duergr. Ek uar ok þar ok kolludu þeir mig þa
Nornagest. Uar Hialpreki kunnlæiki a mer þa er hann uar Danmork
med Sigemunde Uolsungssyne) simultaneously affirms and denies
the authenticity of the narrative (Ng 350). Its affirmation consists in
Gest’s empirical value as an eyewitness to these events, even as the
historical impossibility of the subjective analepsis denies its affiliation
to the real and underscores its significative function as process and
product of sublimation. Upon producing forensic evidence of the
particularly implausible narreme of the lock of horse hair, seven ells
in length, (var hann .vik. elna harr) the narrative diegesis is
punctured, the frame hoves in, and Gest’s audience unanimously
communicate their approval: Lofudu nu allir frasagnir hans ok
fræklæik (Ng 354). In its staging of the performance of oral texts,
and particularly in the dialectic mode which structures the latter
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
phase of the Saga Gestz, Nornagests þáttr provides some of the only
contemporary, or at least near-contemporary, evidence we have for
the way that narrative art may have circulated prior to the advent of
alphabetic literacy.30 Its normative coordination of enjoyment in a
narrative with multiple points of intertextual imbrication—with Óláfs
saga Tryggvassonar, Vǫlsunga saga and Reginsmal, as well the
Meleagros cycle as found in Hesiod, Homer, Appollodorus and Ovid—
underscores the political value of sublimation as a socially cohesive
force. The antiquarian project which furnished this text for posterity
sets the textual object between the reading subject and the traumatic
exertion of the real as it is revealed in history. In like manner Gest’s
frame narrative posits a lustrous syntagmatic structure that becalms
anxieties of origin through its privileged assertion of heroic value and
dynastic affiliation. The reward for which is an effortless admission
to, and integration with, a higher power, through baptism, that
renders the value of the sublime object of the candle nugatory as
Gest is cathartically laid to rest at the close of the textual set (Ng
359).
The verses of the Darraðarljóð are thought to have been composed
as early as the tenth century but survive through their inclusion in
Njáls saga, a text composed some three to four hundred years later,
as a lausavísur in its one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh episode. Its
situation in the narrative frame is late then, occurring some way
beyond the central praxes that reach crisis at the deaths of Njáll
Þorgeirsson and Gunnarr Hámundarson. Once again a brush against
the supernatural intervention of the destiny of human agents
powerfully re-inflects our understanding of the foregoing narrative,
which has consistently been framed in terms of the operation of fate.
A synchronic design of deterministic fatalism is the structuring
30 See ars Lönnroth, ‘The Founding of Miðgarðr’ in Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (eds.) The Poetic Edda, (New York, 2002).
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
principle of the sagas. Carol Clover has demonstrated how stranding
and simultaneity are employed as ‘a technique of binding together
the narrative mass by a system of “forecasts and concordances.”’31
Both Njáll’s characterisation as ‘langsýnnr ok langminnigr’, meaning
far-sighted and with good memory is part of such an organisational
system: his prophetic agency directs and coordinates reader-
response to the narrative, which is understood, as it were in the
totality of the round, or as single, and complete, image. The reception
groups of the Njála would have had a substantial command of the
historical facts of these stories, and certainly of their main action.
This grants the original saga audience a privileged perspective on the
orchestration of events and the patterning of narrative causality
within the diegesis. The expression of fatalism in the textual object
then, accords with a narrative blueprint that will not admit of
significant deviation. And yet, when the mechanism of fate is luridly
disclosed in the horrific activity transpiring within the weavers’
gynaecium, the schismatic rupture of the signifying fabric attests to
nothing less than an outrageous excess in the capacity of the
symbolic to circumscribe and contain the terror of the real.
The twelve valkyrjur determine the outcome of the battle through
the medium of song as they weave a visceral fabric upon a warp-
weighted loom with human heads for weights and entrails for the
warp and the weft. This mythological conceit, organising the
activities of weaving, wordcraft and warfare, simultaneously
describes the energy of violent prolapse, as the domestic limit of the
skin—itself a fabric of signification—is hideously breached to expose
the abject viscerality which it encloses and masks off. The
extraordinary kenningar oscillate between the limits of subjective
interpretation and the performance of fatalism as operant through
time and human agency:
Nú er fyrir geirum Now, with the spears
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
grár upp kominn a grey woven fabric
vefr verþjóðar of warriors is formed32
This wordplay characteristically compresses multiple meanings
into a single poetic image. The warriors in their grey metal armour,
swarming in lines, are imaged as the threads of grey piece of fabric.
The pattern repeats itself closer to the action, with the interlocking
spears similarly envisaged as forming a type of grey cloth. The
opposition of the grár...vefr verþjóðar’to the rauðum vepti’[‘red weft’]
(116), enacts a dizzying foveation as the imagery sustains a
simultaneous awareness of the structuring patterns determining both
the array of human agents engaged in international warfare, and the
matrices binding blood vessels and muscle tissue together at the
most intimate level of biological interiority.33 This fantasmatic
weaving of fate as a universal activity, a deterministic force, informs
the centripetal energy of the Darraðarljóð which, with the
illocutionary force of its refrain vindum, vindum, winds together
feminine with masculine, creative with destructive, organic with
synthetic, and domestic with international spheres of agency. Nature
itself comes under the sway of the looming, with the conventional
meteorological tropes of blood rain, (116, 118) and the vǫllr roðinn
[‘the field dyed red’] (118) which are respectively identified with the
hanging warp, and the resulting crimson fabric. The centripetal
tendency undergoes a spectacular reversal, however, when the
valkyrjur tear their gory cloth to pieces and gallop their separate
ways. Non-accommodation of the cathexis of the death-drive is
explosively revealed through this violent disruption of the textual
object, and the dissolution of geo-spatial parameters: a centrifugal
sequence of supernatural visitations occurs simultaneously in the
Faeroes, Iceland, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides, conveying a sense
that the pattern of fate has violently unfurled itself throughout the
North Atlantic region (ÍF 12: 459).34
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.
In Old Norse literature representations of fatalism consistently give
place to a reflexive consideration of the signifying practice. The
advent of alphabetic literacy and the institution of scriptoria had
inaugurated the conditions of a novel and vibrant textual culture.
The chiliastic crisis ‘of social structures and their ideological
manifestations’ witnessed the shattering of the planes and surfaces
of representation and stimulated the analytic self-reflection that we
have traced through the tropes of subject-formation and object-
relations in the Vǫluspá. The shape of the textual object, as a
bounded set with its own teleological parameters bears structural
affinity with the concept of fate as an utterance that preconditions
the shape and extent of events in history. The trope of fate,
moreover, is coordinated by the subrogation of a narrative object that
plugs the terrifying void of the objet petit a located at the empty
heart of the symbolic order: a runestone, a candle, a fabric made of
men’s intenstines. These diegetic subrogations themselves mirror
the intervention of the textual object itself between the reading
subject as a participant of the symbolic order and the truth of the real
as it is revealed in history. In Nornagests þáttr the sublime object of
the fantasmatic discourse seals over the terror of the real, and
provides an ideologically normative cohesion of the social and
political order. Conversely, the explosive transgressions of the
Darraðarljóð run up against the very limits of symbolic discourse and
are thus freighted with the horror of abjection and the trauma of the
real. In seeking to give an expression to the mechanism of fate, the
writers of these texts were concerned to define the limits of meaning
in its totality; the ramifications of the textual objects which emerged
from this project, cut a swathe right through to the very heart of the
nature of the subject in its relation to the universe.
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