ultra

enclosed for you all to see just how ridiculous it all is, this striving for inclusion into the world of the pedant. an old draft in desperate need of an update (tomorrow: library all day):


Baudrillard and Pearl: A Reflection of Two Mirrors

Acknowledging the Pearl-dreamer's status as a card-carrying member of the medieval merchant class is undeniable but his participation in this relatively new estate can be viewed with more depth. Pearl can certainly be read with twentieth-century lenses, lenses with foci on the Pearl-dreamer serving as a Baudrillardian consumer. Furthermore, Jean Baudrillard's notions on consumerism can be tracked to death in both a progressive and simultaneous sense. Essentially, I will attempt to plead that Baudrillard's multi-component, 'postmodern' ideas have great relevance and clout when examining the medieval associations of the Pearl-dreamer's relationships and existences; and coupling the words which span hundreds of years is quite enlightening and rewarding.


I. Consumerism and Mirrors

Baudrillard's second, and purportedly most accessible book, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), opens with a clear definition of Baudrillard's view on the new era of humanity:

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of
consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of
objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of
a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly
speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so
much by other human beings, as they were in previous ages, but by
objects (25).

Baudrillard's words seem to imply that this is a phenomenon of modern and recent times yet his thoughts actually align quite nicely with selections in Pearl; as an initial example:

Her cortel of self sute schene
With precios perlez al vmbepy3te
A py3t coroune 3et wer Þat gyrle
Of marjorys and non oÞer ston
(ll. 203-206).

We are given great detail into the composition of her fine clothes and her bejeweled crown. Helen Barr claims that the Pearl-dreamer is indeed of the merchant class but wants to become something greater: 'the jeweler is fascinated by wealth, and especially by the wealth of the aristocracy' (61). Barr?s aforementioned words allude to an underlying sense of great longing or desire by the Pearl-dreamer to reach even a loftier social tier, a desire for something, a desire to become something or someone else. It is again in The Consumer Society where Baudrillard says that consumer behavior, while focused on objects and the enjoyment thereof, actually relates to displaced expressions of desire, apparent through a wide magnitude of signs (78). Could the Pearl-dreamer be the medieval version of the guest on today's lay-psychoanalytical talk show, the one who fills the void in their life by compulsively buying roomfuls of useless objects? This is, of course, a gross exaggeration but the concept still attaches to Baudriallard's 'corpus of signs' (78): the Pearl-dreamer's fixation on the array of objects (the threads, the jewels, the domiciles, etc.) might mask the non-existence of any other humans in his life.

And as yet another illustration, to regress to earlier lines at the very onset of the poem: 'Perle plesaunte, to princes paye / To clanly clos in golde so clere' (ll. 1-2). Andrew and Waldron, in their footnotes to the poem, comment that just these initial lines 'suggest the earthly appreciation of the pearl as an object of value' (53); they seem to propose that diminishing these opening lines of their literal, pre-transformative assessments is perhaps unwise. Felicity Riddy concurs with this opinion as well: 'To read the narrating voice only as that of a mourner in the opening stanzas overlooks the fact that it is simultaneously identified as a jeweller's' (145). Additionally, Barr's thoughts can be implemented as even further reinforcement:

In choosing to cast the dreamer as a jeweler, the poet establishes
a material consciousness right at the heart of the poem by trade, a
jeweler deals in gems, and the narrator is hence cast as a figure
concerned with the market value of luxury commodities (60).

Sometimes looking to just the literal can also be beneficial. The symbolism of the lost pearl as being the Pearl-maiden plays an enormously significant role, obviously, but reading the opening stanza as a merchant's livelihood that is corroding due to losses of objects, is equally as imperative. So, the Pearl-dreamer is recognized as a jeweler first and foremost then. But are not the implications of this important (albeit fiscally based) character trait long known in the annals of Pearl criticism? The above quotes just emphasize this traditional-Marxist modification (I'm thinking, specifically, of Marx's thoughts in the 'Fetishism of Commodities') but exploring the avenue which links Pearl directly to the Baudrilliardian 'school' is exciting in its near limitlessness.

Finally, is it also worthy of note, maybe, that the Pearl-dreamer is the only tangible human in the poem? The Pearl-maiden is merely an uncanny illusion:

More Þen me lyste my drede aros:
I sotd ful style and dorste not calle;
Wyth y3en open and mouth ful clos
I stod as hende as hawk in halle
I hoped Þat gostly watz Þat purpose;
I dred onende quat schulde byfalle
(ll. 181-186)

The Pearl-dreamer has a sense of dread and misrecognition of the 'gostly' being before him. Additionally, the mass of virgins in the Holy City are as well just specters in an ever-deepening, ever-reflective vision:

With gret delyt Þay glod in fere
On golden gratez Þat glent as glasse;
Hundreth Þowsandez I wot Þer were,
And alle in sute her liuréz wasse
(ll. 1105-1108)

This is all significant because the Pearl-dreamer is in a way, as Baudrillard says, not surrounded by any other human beings. By existing in this unreal (or hyperreal?) world of objects and desires he has forfeited contact with fellow beings of the flesh.


II. Mirrors and Hyperreality

In his study of Baudrillard's beliefs, Timothy Luke sweepingly argues that the confusing atmosphere of the post-industrialized world after 1945 is ripe for the breeding of great critical thinkers like Baudrillard. Luke cites the emblematic list of ever-occurring changes (rise in white-collar occupations as opposed to blue-collar ones, the increase in amount of informational goods being produced rather than actual, physical goods, etc.) and he claims that 'intense debates over what these changes mean, and how far they actually go toward constituting a new stage of development, continue today' (347-348). Enter Jean Baudrillard; one certainly qualified to comment on these changes. As I mentioned at the beginning with the introductory remarks, though, it is quite fascinating how much Baudrillard's ideas seem to interlock with the details of Pearl.

We know that at the time of the Pearl-poet, a similar disorienting socio-economic shift was emerging. If we return to Barr, she states that 'the dreamer is fascinated by aristocratic wealth but reveals himself as an impressionable social outsider' (62); in short, he is a self-conscious, 'slightly nervous visitor' (62) to this rising tide of medieval mercantilism. And Riddy, again, further stresses this heavy economic influence on the poem?s structure, for after all it is a 'merchant's grief for the loss of the pearl...and the craftsman's grief for the destruction of the jewel' (155); the Pearl-dreamer is, at his core, simply a member of a profession and class. He is a small cog in the widening economic apparatus.

While these parallels are indeed alluring, it is what is at the center of Baudrillard's critique that is truly important--to return to Luke--and that is Baudrillard's 'notion of hyperreality, or the fabricated system of meaning that limits human participation in the world to the role of consumer or responder, rather than producer or initiator' (347). I have attempted to establish that the Pearl-dreamer takes on the role of consumer from the poem's opening lines. And I have attempted to further this consumerist's role in a general 'then-versus-now' socio-economic comparison. But what I have yet to discuss is this additionally interesting perception of the Pearl-dreamer as not being an ?initiator? amidst his existence in a hyperreality. Does the Pearl-dreamer ever really initiate any of the actions between himself and the Pearl-maiden? One could argue that they both remain in separate, parallel discourses that never truly interact but I think, instead, that the Pearl-maiden's role serves as a 'producer' (to borrow Luke's words via Baudrillard) to the actions of the Pearl-dreamer.

By examining the relationship between the Pearl-dreamer and the Pearl-maiden in three key, equally-spaced sections of the poem, this responder-initiator dynamic can become clearer. Firstly, take for instance the early moments of the exchange between the Pearl-maiden and the Pearl-dreamer:

Bot, jueler gente, if Þou schal lose
Þy joy for a gemme Þat Þe watz lef,
Me Þynk Þe put in a mad porpose,
And busyez Þe aboute a raysoun bref
(ll. 265-268)

This stanza rebuking the Pearl-dreamer ends with: 'Þou art no kynde jueler' (l. 276). To this, the Pearl-dreamer responds with delight of having found his jewel and expresses this with a sense of utmost happiness: ?I were a joyful jueler? (l. 289). The Pearl-dreamer officially exists now in this Baudrillardian hyperreality, he is merely a consumer focused on gems and acts only as a respondent to the words of the Pearl-maiden.

Next, the Pearl-dreamer has nothing but disbelief for the 'rank' of the Pearl-maiden in Heaven: 'I cannot but think your words are wrong. / You set yourself too high in this, / To be crowned a queen, that was so young' (Borroff, ll. 473-475). Indeed this sets up the Pearl-maiden into moment where she must respond to his grievances but her response actually initiates an entire new thread of her discourse, she produces language (the Vineyard Parable--albeit borrowed heavily from Biblical source she still constructs the tale) which places him back into the role of responder, especially since the Parable's focus is on commercial mechanisms.

Third, the Pearl-dreamer follows the lead of the Pearl-maiden in his expanding vision:

If I Þis mote schal vnhyde,
Bow vp towarde Þys bornez heued,
And I anendez Þe on Þis syde
Schal sve, tyl Þou to a hill be veued
(ll. 973-976).

The Pearl-maiden has produced the glimpse of the Holy City (via permission of the Lamb) wherein the Pearl-dreamer proceeds to carefully examine the material properties, the 'gentyl gemmez' (l. 991), that make up the great walls of the city. Her great, extensive production is immediately consumed by the eyes and thoughts and words of the Pearl-dreamer.

Herein exists, between the interactions of the Pearl-dreamer and the Pearl-maiden, a sort of medieval English take on Baudrillard's concept of a hyperreality. There is clearly a progressive-yet-simultaneous trend with the poem's opening establishing the consumerist-producer roles--these concepts are introduced but exist as the ever-current spine. So, how does this progression all end--or begin again? With death, perhaps? And how does death in Pearl relate to Baudrillard's complex thoughts on that very subject? Maybe the beautiful, faceted pun of the pearl as being tucked 'al awaye...in cofer' (l. 258-259) can serve as segue.


III. Hyperreality and Death

In a selection from his pivotal work, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Baudrillard declares with a note reminiscent of Nietzschean finality: 'we are at the end of production' (131). In other words, the late twentieth-century context in which Baudrillard is referencing has reached a point where only consumption is left. The death of production, so to speak. So, in keeping with our representations from the previous section--Pearl-dreamer as consumer, Pearl-maiden as producer--then the implications here prove to be self-lucid.

Douglas Kellner revisits Baudrillard's proposals that 'fear of death and desire to prove one's own immortality, one's divine election, fueled the era of production and accumulation' (104). The Pearl-dreamer's era was certainly an era undergoing significant changes in its social make-up and this is why he has such a difficult time reconciling the death of his young daughter. Borroff's translation is particularly enlightening in that it employs the rhetorical essence of our modern economic hyperreality and links it to the Pearl-dreamer's own consumerist-based time:

But such is the coffer closing it round,
With the worth of a pearl it is now imbued.
And fate, you say, has robbed you of good,
That rendered you profit free and clear;
(ll. 271-274)

The rhetoric of mercantilism is straightforward and the poetic flair in the translation is gorgeous. Kellner, in his study, continues with words that serve well as a response to such passages:

Baudrillard suggests that the repression of death is the
fundamental mechanism which produces an unconscious rooted...in a
socially mandated fear of death. This, in turn, gives rise to an
autonomous psychic sphere marked by desires...to posses, to devour
(104).

The Pearl-dreamer is certainly repressing death in that he is substituting objects for humans, as is the 'rule' in a hyperreality. In continuation, the Pearl-maiden scolds him for this, as well: 'You blame a blessing misunderstood: / You are no proper jeweler' (ll. 275-276). His misinterpretation, stemming from his repression, seems to be characteristic of such consumerist practices. So often in the poem he is commenting, in some form or another, on the beauty of materialism, whether it is in the style of dress of the Pearl-maiden or in the architecture of her kingdom. Or even with the procession at the very end of the poem: 'Þe Lombe byfore con proudly passe / Wyth hornez seuen of red golde cler; / As praysed perlez His wedez wasse' (ll. 1110-1112).

Death acts a backbone to the entire poem but when relating the theme to a Baudrillardian sense of mind, one finds the fit rather snug. In the realm of hyperreality, Baudrillard asserts that in order to cope 'death should never be interpreted as an actual occurrence in a subject or body, but rather as a form...where the determination of the subject and value disappears' (127). Regardless of how one argues the overall merits of the poem's 'lesson,' the Pearl-dreamer is never really able to fully overcome this fear of death; he is never able to achieve what the Pearl-maiden has. Maybe, only through his own death, can the Pearl-dreamer ever really detach himself from the lingering fear and desire. Perhaps only then can he alter his discernment and let them simply disappear like the image of a mirror reflected in a mirror, folding into itself beyond perception.




Works Cited


Barr, Helen. 'Pearl-Or the 'Jeweller's Tale.' Medium Aevum 69.1
(2000): 59-80.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans.
Sage Publications. London: Sage Publications, Ltd, 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. 'Symbolic Exchange and Death.' Trans. Charles Levin.
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. 2nd Edition. Ed. Mark Poster.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 122-151.

Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and
Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Luke, Timothy W. 'Power and politics in hyperreality: The critical project of
Jean Baudrillard.' Social Sciences Journal 28.3 (1991): 347-368.

Riddy, Felicity. 'Jewels in Pearl.' A Companion to the Gawain-Poet. Ed.
Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997:
143-155.