Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight

For those inclined to meddle with punctuation (and medievalists are more inclined than most to meddle with punctuation) the subtitle of Arthur Bahr's monograph offers an enticing bit of grammatical frisson. With its commas in place, the subtitle scans as a provocative list of descriptors for Bahr's project: the speculation that the enigmatic Pearl-Manuscript—the unique witness to Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—invites in both its singularity and its aesthetic strangeness; the architectonic shapes or “fayre formez” that inhere to the four poems and to the codex itself; the puzzling spiritual, intellectual, and literary delights that the work has long offered to readers. Take away the commas, however, and the subtitle becomes a simple declarative sentence: Speculation shapes delight. And so it does in Bahr's beautifully written and sumptuously illustrated book, which offers a thoughtful, ludic, and often provocative challenge to decades of criticism on the manuscript now known as British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x / 2. Bahr himself, for what it's worth, is in on his own subtitular joke: “Speculation shapes my delight” (p. 21), he writes toward the end of his introduction. The assertion not only underscores the personally inflected and subjective aspects of Bahr's approach in the chapters that follow; it also offers an invitation to precisely the kinds of productive speculation and intellectual play that earlier studies of these poems have tended to shy from and have sometimes actively stifled. Bahr offers a corrective to such analytical pieties, and his work in Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript models the generative potential of marrying a diligent and intellectually rigorous research praxis with an equally open and generous mode of critical inquiry.Speculation, for Bahr, emerges in chapter one as a central hermeneutic for the interpretation of both the Pearl-Manuscript as a material text and the quartet of vexing works that it preserves. In developing that hermeneutic, Bahr pushes away from a postmedieval sense of speculation as “mere surmise,” “underinformed supposition,” or “unscrupulous financial wheeling-and-dealing” (p. 22) and argues instead for a more historically grounded definition, in which speculation is at once “a process grounded in sensory perception” (p. 28) and a correlative to the intellectual processes of cognition and contemplation. This redefinition of a central term—or perhaps reclamation is a more apt descriptor—is more than a clever semantic gambit to allow for Bahr's style of inquiry. It is, rather, an assertion of responsibility on Bahr's part and an implicit challenge to other critics. Bahr surely recognizes the risk he runs by investing so heavily in a critical practice that is regularly prefaced with the word “idle,” and without doubt, there will be some readers of this monograph (and perhaps some reviewers, too) who will make the claim that Bahr is just guessing here, that he's overreading or underreading or being too subjective, even that he likes these poems too much. Such responses, in my opinion, utterly miss the point of Bahr's intervention. Yes, Bahr clearly loves these poems and is enchanted by this manuscript, and yes, his readings reflect the sense of astonishment and passion that they evoke. (And why should that be a bug rather than a feature?) At the same time, however, his speculation and sense of delight are everywhere twinned with strong historical and literary research and powerful argumentation, with a grounded sense of what these works meant in their own time and in ours, and with a keen eye for the nuances of language and paleography and illustration. Bahr's speculation, in other words, is never idle, and the readings that he generates, playful as they are, are fundamentally persuasive.Bahr uses the order of the Manuscript to structure his study, and he focuses most acutely on what he calls “moments of suture” (p. 14) between the poems—the endings, beginnings, and overlaps that become most evident in their manuscript context. In his analysis of Pearl, the first poem in the manuscript and a work whose otherworldliness makes it especially ripe for “speculation of the imaginative, meditative sort” (p. 45), Bahr argues that the poem paradoxically occupies a space of uniqueness and universal availability, a position inscribed within Pearl's poetic appeals to Christian soteriology and also embodied in the singularity of the poem itself, in the essentially unanswerable questions that arise from its survival in a single manuscript. Scholars have previously explored how Pearl's “mistakes” blur the distinction between authorial choice, scribal error, and editorial prerogative; however, Bahr shows that for this particular poem, material uniqueness generates a kind of expanding poetic value, which the poem itself—with its refrains of “more and more,” “enough,” “never the less,” and “pay”—seeks to complicate through its particular spiritual economics.In the following chapter, the material circumstances of the manuscript itself drive Bahr's analysis of the “moment of suture” between Pearl and Cleanness. Indeed, the textual and poetic alignments between adjacent poems—the ways in which the manuscript's idiosyncrasies in lineation, illustration, and ornamentation create productive and suggestive uncertainties—emerge as something of a leitmotif in the monograph. In this first instance, Bahr makes a convincing and granular case for an alignment between Pearl's demanding formal structures and Cleanness's opening lines, suggesting how the “connective tissue” (p. 15) binding the two poems encourages us to “look with fresh eyes at the material craftedness of the poet's verbal art” (p. 101). The following chapter, “Shaping Delight in Cleanness,” continues to think the poem's literary and verbal textures against its manuscript idiosyncrasies, focusing most particularly on a regular if suggestively imperfect series of paraph marks visible on the poem's left margin. Again, Bahr acknowledges that the precise function or intent of the paraph marks cannot be definitively known, but he speculates nonetheless about their potential, rendering the unknowability of the poem's manuscript context into a lens through which to consider the work as a whole.The pivot from Cleanness to Patience, which occurs at a cluster of variously defined “midpoints” within the manuscript, recalls the analogous transition from Pearl to Cleanness. Bahr's attention to detail is particularly satisfying here, and his analysis of the overlapping pictorial, structural, and discursive programs of this hinge moment lead seamlessly into his consideration of Patience's unusual material circumstances. In my opinion, the chapter on Patience is in many ways the most speculative, as authorial and scribal agency give way to the material and animal exigencies of parchment, follicle, and bookworm. Nonetheless, the power and bravura of Bahr's reading affirm the possibility of such informed speculation, opening readings that extend our current understandings of this often-overlooked poem and drive us to consider it in new ways.If the through line for Patience is its materiality, the line that carries Bahr's readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by far the most thoroughly studied of the four poems, is a geometric one: the inscribed and implied lines of manuscript illustrations, the shapes and asymmetries of stanzas and lines, the generative flexibility of the poem's internal form and the productive uncertainty of its textual and cultural environment. The literature on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is voluminous. It is a testament to Bahr's readings that they are able to recall the strangeness and wonder of this most canonical of poems, that they offer genuinely new insights on such hard-trodden critical ground.At its core, Bahr's book is a celebration of the unknown, a timely reminder that reading and criticism are always speculative acts and that the hard edges of empirical knowledge necessarily coexist with the gauzier shapes of imagination and delight. By embracing both the empirical and the speculative—both what can and what cannot be definitively known—Bahr succeeds in offering new understandings of the Pearl-Manuscript and generating compelling new readings of its four poems. Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript is a beautiful, powerful, exciting book. It will inform scholarship on Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for years to come.