Ruins in the Realm of Thoughts: Reading as Constellation in Anglo-Saxon Poetry

by RENÉE R. TRILLING, University of Illinois


Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Wrætlic is pes wealstan— wyrde gebræcon,
burgstede burston; brosnad enta geweorc.
—The Ruin

The historicity of medieval texts and their afterlives in the modern period has been a key element of modern Anglo-Saxon scholarship, and many scholars, such as Pauline Head, assert "the unavoidable value of subjective reading" for the modern reader approaching a medieval text. This should hardly come as a surprise, even to medievalists; most of the literature we deem worthy of the name receives that attention precisely because it presents itself as endlessly re-readable, always subject to new interpretation. If this observation sounds irredeemably postmodern, it is worth noting that the German Romantics made the same claims about poetry more than two hundred years ago. In the age of the Enlightenment, art revealed its ineffability through criticism's best attempts to define the category of the aesthetic; in the wake of poststructuralism and Marxist historicism, by contrast, such totalization is anathema. In both contexts, however, the notion of the work of art derives precisely from what is unrepresentable about it. In the eighteenth century, this ineffability was defined as moral truth, and it grounded the work of literary criticism. In the mid-twentieth century, by contrast, ineffability became indeterminability, and truth was surrendered to the play of the text. While both kinds of analysis can tell us a great deal about how texts work, neither an idealist Kantian aesthetics nor a radically affirmative postmodern skepticism offers a way to deal with the problem of history.