MARGINALIA

A meditation on the medieval and the postmodern

Published in Australian Quarterly, in 2000

In that wild and uncertain time once called the Dark Ages, monks at the extreme Western edge of the world--in Ireland, in Iona, in Lindisfarne--laboured for years at the copying and illustration of the Gospels.  Perhaps they did not always fully understand what they were transcribing, for they made spelling and translation mistakes, yet their work remains indescribably moving and powerful. On the centre of each parchment page unfolds the story that has been told over and over again for two millenia, seemingly tirelessly; a story adorned with meticulously beautiful lettering and weirdly gorgeous, slyly animistic images of men and women, animals and strange half-creatures. And sometimes, on the margins, there is a notation, an unexpected irruption from the monk's own life. The Irish manuscripts have yielded a rich trove of these.

'Tonight the bitter wind shakes the sea's white hair. Tonight I fear not the men of Norway, coursing over the Irish Sea,' scribbles a monk in the 9th century, and instantly the cold wind whistles in our ears, blowing its brief respite from fear.

'I see the sun shine on the page; it is good,' writes another monk in the same century, pausing for a moment so that we catch a glimpse of his presence down the long centuries.

'I and Pangur Ban my cat,

'Tis a like task we are at;

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night. . '

Thus starts a marginal poem in an eighth-century copy of Saint Paul's epistles, a poem that in Robin Flower's translation breathes with liveliness and wit. We are entranced by these marginalia; in this century of exhaustive and extensive scholarship, when the enormous reserves of ancient manuscripts are being slowly picked over and mined for every gem and pebble of information, they seem to escape the confines of time, of history, of our own classification. In their sweet smallness, the marginalia seem more real to us than the central story to which they are appended. The intimate, the curious, the small, the bizarre, the unfinished, uncertain and marginal: that is  

the taste of an age gone beyond modernity to something else as yet undefined, which goes under the unsatisfactory term of postmodern. To be postmodern means to reject the centre, to inhabit the margins, to be as travellers in a strange land. To a degree this is something the medieval monks would have understood. It is something that made them leave their mark on the glorious beauty they were creating; not the mark of their egos, for they were not moderns, but something else, both anonymous and deeply personal.

In our own time, the medieval is seen as the mirror of the postmodern, something which is demonstrated in the extraordinary explosion of interest in medieval culture. We have rediscovered the music, the literature, the folk beliefs of that vast millenium known as the Middle Ages, stretching from the implosion of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance,It's not the first time, of course; in times of spiritual and cultural uncertainty, the medieval always makes a comeback, and is interpreted according to the needs of the time. And so we focus especially on the marginality of the Middle Ages, its lack of a truly defined centre, whether political or cultural, except for the metaphysical idea of Christendom. Yet even this was not truly a centre; for everywhere, on the Eastern and Western margins, on the Southern and Northern borders, in the heartland itself, that idea shifted and shimmered and changed shape even as you looked at it. The Church understood that well, and reconsecrated pagan sacred wells and created saints from mythological fragments, in the same moment as it fought--often vainly-- against the ceaseless tide of heresy and questioning. For the Middle Ages is the time when authority had to struggle every step of the way to establish itself; far from being monolithic and rigid, medieval authority, whether sacred or secular, was in a state of constant flux, with rebellion, rather than orthodoxy, being the key element of medieval life. This was also a time of great mass movements, of travel, of pilgrimages. More so than at any other time until our own, ordinary people's physical horizons were not bound by their village, and the crowds who thronged the pilgrim roads came from all walks of life.                   

  In fact, that diverse millenium we call the Middle Ages represents the spirit of Western culture itself. More than Greece, more than Rome, more than the Enlightenment project, the syncretic, omnivorous genius of the Middle Ages is the heart of it. This is a centre, though, which is not made up of one thing, but of many, which is characterised by fluidity rather than definition, in which swirl and babble and flow a legion of influences. That is why the marginal notations are there on the Word Itself, why in that great Age of the Image there are slyly animist creatures in every corner of the illustrations, why the great stone books of cathedrals are filled with carved stories of saints and devils and serfs and kings, of erotic love and savage hatred and fatalistic irony. The medieval saw no contradiction in any of these things; wandering through a forest of symbols and allusions and hidden meanings, following the question but never the answer, they seemed repellent and strange to the moderns who followed them, who cast further back for a solid idea of centre. They seem repellent and strange still to many people; books, films, popular images are full of the onedimensional notion of the Middle Ages as some kind of brutish, high-smelling period when a vicious Church reigned and a rigid feudalism held all in thrall: an image that has filtered down through the centuries from the Renaissance, sprightly offshoot of the medieval, which sought to turn its back on its recent past, and to put in its place  the shining twin lights of humanism and rationality, gifts of the ancient societies of Greece and Rome. Re-interpreted through early modern eyes, those were to be held up as the true template for Western culture, and the medieval buried for good as a thousand-year interlude of barbarism and darkness.

And so it seems the perfect precedent for postmoderns, that long-ago vivid, uncertain millenium. Yes, but here's the rub; for although we postmodern people talk glibly of the marginal, yet we are inheritors not only of the medieval, but also of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, of that rediscovered, refiltered Greece and Rome. We can no longer be as eighth-century monks, content to copy and transcribe a story come from somewhere else, content to leave our marginalia anonymous, our living human presence just glimpsed in the margins of the centre. We write theoretical papers about the Other and the Marginal but take care that our names are associated with them. We pour scorn on the idea of the Centre, assigning ownership of this hot potato of an idea to our intellectual or political opponents, whether that be as left or right, as Leavisite or Derridean, as radical or as conservative, as young or old, white or black, man or woman, anything you like versus anything else you like. Nobody wants to be at the centre anymore, everyone claims marginal status. We are a conglomeration of margins, who say we can no longer presume to speak for a whole culture, but for one splinter out of a multiplicity of other matchwoods, harvested from that ancient forest of symbol and allusion. And yet each time we speak thus we betray unconsciously the knowledge that the centre is indeed there, within all of us; for if it was not, it would make no sense to talk of margins at all. And the margins themselves have only been margins to the centre; not to themselves. For the monks writing in their windswept monasteries, watching the horizon for Viking ships, that was the centre; their copying work, the margins. The heart-stirring story of the Gospels was about a strange time, a strange place; and so, it must be clothed in the knowledge of their own time, for it then became a living fibre of their beings. It became, too, a bulwark against their fear, against the return of ancient monsters which the Romans in their hubris had thought buried for ever; it became theirs, and not only an obscure Jewish story of martyrdom and redemption. Its centrality gave power and value to the Westerners' lives, just as their own marginality gave meaning to a story that might otherwise have died with the borders of the old Roman Empire. And so margin to centre shifted constantly, played on each other, sparked and danced, creating something that still has the power to move us all those centuries away in the great sweeping circle of time.

We think we understand ourselves so much better now, because we have so much more information, so much theory, so much analysis. We aren't reduced to wandering in the forest, like medieval knight-errants; its plan and labyrinth is laid out before us in the writings of the philosophers of our time and those who blazed a trail or two before them. Our theorists claim to be true postmoderns, curious, open, questing, not tied to the rationalist humanist legacy, yet at every step they show how indebted they are to it. Multiplicity, marginality, heterogeneity, are much bandied around yet curiously there is a sameness about much of the theory and of the creative work which flows from it. Perhaps that is because they are in the process of attempting to create that centre itself, the new one which gobbles up bits of the old, thus reducing it to the margins, whilst proclaiming itself to be the creed of the emerging, the strange and the new.

It is a sad thing though that one theory gang looks much the same as the other. And that, furthermore, it often looks just as uncomfortable and left-behind in its understanding of the creed of this new world as did the old. For the postmodern is not just the anti-racist, feminist, ecological, high-tech, anti-homophobic freedom-loving paradise proclaimed in its 'media vectors', but also the return of the reign of fear, a vicious, tribal, savage fragmentation and shattering, a dissociation from society, a return to strange ancient beliefs in new guise, a making of the rational and the humanist into something marginal and powerless and fearful. The circle of time returns; never describing exactly the same arc, never exactly in the same orbit, but bringing with it the breath of presences from another time, another world. In the hectically exciting, scarily uncertain, vividly tumultuous dawn of the century and the millenium, the marginalia of the medieval seem ever more urgent, ever more moving, ever more real.

© Copyright Sophie Masson 2003