The poem I just wrote - a poem by Joy Harjo

For the end of a long and intense month where breaks and pauses have been few and far between, I give you a short and beautiful poem by Joy Harjo, from her collection She had some horses (1983). 





The poem I just wrote 

The poem I just wrote is not real. 
And neither is the black horse 
who is grazing on my belly. 
And neither are the ghosts 
of old lovers who smile at me 
from the jukebox. 

  

The violence of Peter Wilkins - violence and Utopia in an eighteenth-century novel

For years I have been fascinated with Utopian fiction, i.e., stores that depict ideal societies, usually serving as a form of contemporary social commentary. In what we might call self-labelled Utopian fiction – that is fiction directly or indirectly inspired by Thomas More’s novel Utopia and thereby written after its publication in 1516 – the key recognisable elements of such societies are often well developed and used in a variety of different ways. However, similar forms of social commentary through imaginary places are found in abundance prior to More’s novel, and to fully understand the genre of Utopian fiction and its many complex components, it is often necessary to cast a very broad chronological net to see how the invention of, or reflections on, non-existent places function within a given discourse. I am currently dedicating some time to this kind of literature, and I hope to be able to develop my thoughts on various subjects pertaining to Utopian societies in the coming months.

Recently, I finished reading one such Utopian novel, published in 1751, namely The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock. The novel describes the eponymous protagonist’s journey from England to Africa and onwards to a land far to the south, in which he encounters a country of winged humans. Through his familiarity with metal and firearms – above all cannons salvaged from the ship on which he arrived – Peter Wilkins aids the king of the flying people to quell a rebellion and once more unite the vast kingdom. Desirous to spread Christianity and abolish slavery, Wilkins reforms the society of the kingdom, and continues to extend the territory of the king right to the very edge of the continent (which is the hypothesised southern land which was not yet documented by 1751). The novel is a troubling mix of imperialism, evangelism and abolitionism which really captures the complexities of eighteenth-century discourse, and provides an interesting and worthwhile read.

For my current purposes, my main interest in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is the function of violence in the making and sustaining of the Utopian society. The aspect of violence is an integral part of many Utopian stories, and violence serves different functions in how the ideal society is understood. In some cases, an ideal society is marked by the absence of violence, in other cases the ideal society is brought about through violence, and in yet other cases the ideal society is sustained by violence. Not infrequently, violence serves both a creating and a maintaining function in a Utopia. (I have written on the role of violence in Utopian societies in this blogpost.)

The case of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat peculiar, because it belongs to a particular sub-genre of the Utopian story that combines elements of the Robinsonade. In other words, the plot of the novel revolves around one – sometimes more – individuals shipwrecked and cast ashore in a strange and unknown country, whose society is in many ways radically different from their own. Such stories differ from the general plot of Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the reader receives a travelogue from a traveller who has arrived at the ideal society and then left it without any trouble or hindrance. The style of the travelogue renders the story more descriptive, and the polemical edge of this description is perhaps sharper in other, more adventure-like stories.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Utopian stories that employ elements of the Robinsonade is that like Robison Crusoe his island, so the protagonists of these stories often employ their technological knowledge and/or political precepts from their native countries to transform Utopia. In some such cases, the Utopia in question might be an ideal society that is destroyed by the application of the protagonist’s programme, perhaps most famously in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Undeground Travels. In other Robinsonade-cum-Utopian stories, it is the protagonist who creates the ideal society by transforming the Utopia – the no-place or imagined place – in accordance with their principles and their ambitions. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins belongs to the latter category.

Peter Wilkins becomes acquainted with a society where the people are noble, industrious, clever, and have obtained a high-level intricate society of complex rituals, traditions and administration. Yet their primary technology is stone, they are a slave society, and their form of religion consists of what the Anglican Peter Wilkins deems idolatry. By the end of Peter’s time in this country – Normnbdsgrsutt [sic!] – the society remains a kingdom, but all slaves are now free, its territories are vastly extended, they have colonised previously uninhabited areas, taken up the use of metal, and adopted a version of their religion that does not contain idol-worship. This transformation comes through battles against rebellious subjects and through the conquest of a country of slave-holders. At the heart of this transformation is Peter Wilkins’ use of cannons and pistols, against which the pike-wielding armies of flying men stand no chance.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins provides an interesting and disturbing example of how envisioned ideal societies are heavily intertwined with the use of violence. The grand reforms of Normnbdsgrsutt and other neighbouring kingdoms are first of all made possible through violent means. Even if, as in this case, the violence is a response to extraneous violence, this response is not the end. Instead, Peter Wilkins goes further in his ambitions and takes advantage of the newly-established peace to control resources and initiate the production of metalwork. While the fabrication of armament is not mentioned as one of the pursuits of this metalwork, the cannons and pistols brought by Peter Wilkins would provide suitable models for copying should the flying people so desire. There is perhaps a hint of regret about this possibility in an aside comment in which the protagonists darkly questions whether his efforts of civilising have been all that positive.

The role of violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is a curious reminder that ideal societies are not necessarily brought about or sustained through ideal means, and that a potential for rot exists at the heart of most, if not all, of these Utopias. Robert Paltock’s novel is an importance case study in this regard, because it combines violence used to obtain goals with which few would not sympathise – the abolition of slavery – with violence used to extend territory and evangelise. Moreover, the possible future fabrication of firearms and cannons lurks as a devouring shadow at the edges of this transformed society, notwithstanding a prophecy of prosperity for 1500 years.

The violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins forces us to grapple with the following question: how ideal are our visions of ideal society? Moreover, how do we avoid violence? How do we prevent the rot of violence at the heart of reforms and transformations? These questions are especially important due to the polemic function of Utopian stories. They are meant as social commentary, as a way to help us recognise errors in our own society and help us envision ways to deal with those errors. The question is whether we recognise those of our solutions that carry the rot within them, or whether we employ those faulty solutions only to end up with faulty replacements. 

The Madonna of Enebakk Church

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, and to mark this feast I present you, briefly and succinctly, with this Madonna with the Christ-child from the Church of Enebakk in Akershus, Eastern Norway. The sculpture was one gloriously painted, and traces of red can still be seen on Mary's dress. It is most likely form Norway, and is roughly dated to the period c.1230-c.1250. It is a testament to the notably high level of woodcraft in thirteenth-century Norway, and one among several Madonna sculptures that survive from the period. 

The sculpture is currently housed at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, but is currently in storage awaiting the reopening of the museum's medieval exhibition. Its former house, Enebakk Church, is a surviving structure from the medieval period. At the time of writing, I have not yet been there, but I hope to have a chance to visit soon.    

Creative googling and its consequences - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 4

 

Friday, March 10, I gave a seminar on Vikings in medievalism, explaining how our current ideas about Vikings were shaped by the renewed interest in medieval history in nineteenth-century Scandinavia. The ideas that came into place in this period were formed by a very particular context which blended romanticism, nationalism and scholarship. In Norway, for instance, one of the driving forces behind this interest in medieval history was the desire to provide nineteenth-century Norwegians with a golden age that could serve as a reference point in moulding the Norwegian nation-state of the 1800s, a period when Norway the weaker part of a union with Sweden. In Denmark, the interest in medieval history was in part moved by the loss of Norway to Sweden in 1814, and later pressure from expansionist Prussia which in turn resulted in the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864.

While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish interests were moved by different impulses, these interests were nonetheless part of a wider phenomenon that appeared in many Western European countries. Consequently, despite the particulars of, say, Swedish medievalism, the Swedish ideas about the medieval past were part of a wider discourse and was therefore shaped by that discourse. This discourse also included input from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian diaspora in Canada and the United States.

The details concerning this historical developments are both interesting and numerous, and will hopefully be dealt with in a future blogpost, or perhaps several. However, in this present blogpost, my main aim is to share some of the reflections I made in the preparation for the seminar, and what I learned from the preparation process. It all started with some creative googling.

Even though the seminar was primarily focussed on nineteenth-century medievalism and how that medievalism shaped the modern ideas about the Viking, I thought this seminar would be a good opportunity to follow these ideas into the twenty-first century. I therefore decided to spend a couple of hours on the Internet, using very general search-terms that might yield some broader understanding of how pervasive and ubiquitous the figure of the Viking actually is in our day and age. One important foundational principle for this more or less aimless foray into cyberspace is the idea that the Viking is one of those reference points in a common register of what we might call ludic figures. These figures that are employed in cultural outputs because they are known by a very wide audience, and are therefore often used for play or gaming purposes. Examples of such ludic figures are pirates, ninjas, and cowboys, and such figures are often used in the same cultural expression, for instance if a film, a novel or a comic-book features pirates and cowboys in the same story, something which frequently happens. Because the Viking is a ludic figure, the Viking is often brought into play in cultural outputs, even when Vikings do not normally appear in the chronological or geographical setting in which that cultural output takes place. For instance, Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’ from his short-story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) tells of Vikings reaching West Africa, thereby using the commonly-known figure of the Viking in a setting untypical of the Viking to create an entertaining story.

Knowing that Vikings are often fused with other such ludic elements popular in the common frame of reference, I decided to see what I could find, and how far afield I could follow the Vikings in the popular imagination. Since Vikings are not only used in entertainment and culture, but also for commercial purposes and in politics, I went on to cast a very wide net. My first port of call was Vikings and pizza. Remembering a pizzeria in York, UK, called Viking Pizza, I decided to dig a bit further, and learned that not only is this pizzeria still going – serving among other things its Viking pizza which is six toppings of your choice – but also that there is a nationwide chain called Vikings Pizza, whose website was blocked for Norwegian IP addresses, for some peculiar reason. This foray into modern food culture also brought to mind an advertisement campaign from my native Norway about twenty years ago, when a new brand of ham and tomato pizza made a claim that Vikings were the first to put tomato on their bread, on account of their contact with – the tomato-less – Vinland. Both these examples remind us that Vikings sell.

Moving on from culinary commercialism, I decided to try out various geographical connections. This yielded a throve of material. For instance, I found a picture of a reconstruction of a Viking ship in Sydney Harbour, taken in 2013, and learned of a collaboration between the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Swedish History Museum. Another antipodean find was a dart made in New Zealand called a ‘Viking hammer dart’, with decorations reminiscent of generic Norse knotwork patterns, and with an advertisement text that made a great effort in connecting the modern ideas about the Vikings – rampage and destruction – with this particular product.

Further geographically oriented searches produced a number of results pertaining to Vikings in space, including the 1963 novel Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper, and some short videos that dealt with the idea of Vikings in space. While I included Piper’s novel as a way to demonstrate how far removed from their chronological and geographical contexts Vikings could be used, it also served as a useful way to point out that this common imagination also yields real-life consequences, and in the mid-1970s the space probe programme called Viking was launched.

I also tried a few searches that connected Vikings with other ludic reference points, such as dinosaurs and robots, and the results were both varied and numerous, and provided good examples of just how ubiquitous the Viking is in the common imagination. Things did, however, take a weird turn, and not very long into my creative googling – I mean, my research. When searching for results in connections with Vikings at the centre of the earth – which was about halfway in my efforts – I got my first hit that pertained to literary pornography. The Internet being what it is, I guess it was inevitable that some of my searches should bring me into contact with pornography – thankfully, its literary kind – but the particular form was nonetheless unexpected. It was about this point that I became a bit despondent about my endeavours, and although I appreciate some forms of unbridled creativity, I had hoped to avoid certain of its incarnations.

At about the one-hour mark, I suspect, the overload of impressions and impulses had worn me out quite a bit, partly through the many encounters of Vikings in space and the various iterations of this theme, but especially due to the brief contact with erotic literature – erotic literature of a very weird kind. While at first I laughed heartily in my office when grasping what this result actually was, it was also something that hinted of a subtext and a subculture that employ these ludic figures in ways that are very far from my own comfort zone. My despondency grew even worse once I made some attempts to find useful material concerning the right-wing use of the Vikings, although that was an expected outcome since it always depresses me to do research on contemporary right-wing culture. 

On the whole, the two hours spent more or less aimlessly looking into various nooks and crannies of the Internet served me very well in the seminar, and it generally gave me a much broader understanding of the Viking in popular culture, and as a contemporary point of reference. My endeavour also fortified my conviction that having a broad familiarity with popular culture is crucial to our scholarly efforts, because this familiarity enables us to explain why a figure such as the Viking has had such a forceful impact, and also to evaluate what kind of impact the use of this figure might have in future iterations. In short, we understand better the after-history of our subject when we pay attention to its use in our own time.

The kind of magpie approach that I used, however, has both its benefits and its drawbacks. On the positive side, I now have a much broader understanding of Vikings in popular culture. On the negative side, the quick deep-immersion into such a vast trove as the Internet very quickly became both very weird and very much, and I felt as if my brain were melting after a while. Instead of doing this brief but intense foray into the subject, it would be better to have a small team dedicated to a concerted effort of gathering material. One day, this might be done and result in some very interesting books. 


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Similar blogposts: 

Adventures in medievalism, part 1 

Adventures in medievalism, part 2 

Adventures in medievalism, part 3