Abstract
Through an analysis of the Byzantine Achilleid, this chapter demonstrates that, although the Byzantine romances are often defined by the violence and patriarchal control exemplified by the hero-hunter Achilles, the enclosed gardens wherein the heroines of romance reside nevertheless depict a posthuman world in which humans, animals, and anthropogenic landscapes thrive in peaceful co-existence. Ecocritical readings of the medieval Greek romance, therefore, can also critique current environmental practice, modeling how Byzantine studies can become a discipline more aware of how its discourses are used in contemporary political and cultural discourses both within and beyond the academy, and how the practice of ethical cultural and literary studies—of which ecocriticism is a part—can be relevant to both scholarly and political debates.
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Notes
- 1.
In Dancing at the Edge of the World, since reproduced in Glotfelty and Fromm 1986.
- 2.
The case is made at length in Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, wherein she further argues that “the hierarchy of meat protein reinforces a hierarchy of race, class, and sex” (53).
- 3.
Le Guin , “Carrier Bag,” 149.
- 4.
Le Guin, “Carrier Bag,” 150.
- 5.
Le Guin, “Carrier Bag,” 151.
- 6.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s posthumanist analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe notes the ways in which her male interlocutors consistently attempt to try to silence her or, barring that, lure her into speech that would condemn her to death, Medieval Identity Machines 154–187, esp. 158.
- 7.
Le Guin , “Carrier Bag,” 152.
- 8.
Le Guin , “Carrier Bag,” 153.
- 9.
This tradition is in many regards as old as the myths themselves: Euripides’ Trojan Women and, later, Ovid’s Heroides prioritize women’s perspectives of stories focusing principally on men. Phillip Parotti’s The Greek Generals Talk (1986) and The Trojan Generals Talk (1988) can be seen in a similar tradition, though, by focusing on men lower in the military hierarchy, they emphasize a marginalization based on class rather than gender.
- 10.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 39.
- 11.
For a history of the term, see Wolfe, What is Posthumanism, xi–xix. Wolfe formulates the clearest definition of his use of the term: “[Post-humanism] forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’—ways that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also insists that we attend to the specificity of the human—its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and describing—by (paradoxically, for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (xxv). Alaimo offers a similar definition, posing some of the questions pertinent to a broader post-human inquiry: “What can it mean to be human in this time when the human is something that has become sedimented in the geology of the planet? What forms of ethics and politics arise from the sense of being embedded in, exposed to, and even composed of the very stuff of a rapidly transforming material world? Can exposing human flesh while making space for multispecies liveliness disperse and displace human exceptionalism? What modes of protest, and what pleasures, do environmentalists, feminists, and other queer subjects improvise? (Alaimo, Exposed, 1).
- 12.
Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 149.
- 13.
Haraway’s is perhaps among the more flexible definitions of the term, particularly in any application that is not concerned with technofuturism and the debate about consciousness as being embodied or disembodied within organic or inorganic material. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, argues that “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (How We Became Posthuman, 3). Nevertheless, she holds out the possibility for other models of posthuman subjectivity not concerned with the posthuman subject as “a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (How We Became Posthuman, 3) by allowing that “the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg […] the defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (How We Became Posthuman, 4). The issue, as with Haraway’s posthumanism, is one of subjectivity, and the ways in which claims of what is and is not human have participated in mechanisms and ideologies of oppression: “Feminist theorists have pointed out that [the liberal humanist subject] has historically been constructed as a white European male, presuming a universality that has worked to suppress and disenfranchise women’s voices; postcolonial theorists have taken issue not only with the universality of the (white male) liberal subject but also with the very idea of a unified, consistent identity, focusing instead on hybridity” (How We Became Posthuman, 4). In this regard, Hayles’ work is applicable to a Byzantine posthumanism that, though disentangled from debates about cybernetics and information technology, is nevertheless invested in questions of subjectivity, marginalization, hybridity, and the ways in which power dynamics operate within medieval texts.
- 14.
Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
- 15.
Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
- 16.
Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
- 17.
Which she bases on modern science: “By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 151).
- 18.
Haraway , “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160.
- 19.
Haraway , “Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
- 20.
On medieval cyborgism, see, for instance, Evans, “Our Cyborg Past”; Glimp, “Moral Philosophy for Cyborgs ”; both Harris, “Mechanical Turks” and Lightsey, “The Paradox of Transcendent Machines” examine related subjects of the interpenetration of technology and organic materiality.
- 21.
Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xiii. As with ecocriticism, Cohen further argues that posthumanism operates at the intersection of the various other foci in identity studies and post-structuralist critique: “Feminist critics have pointed out that the problem with this awestruck model of the body is that it elevates to universal status a fleshly form that presents itself as unmarked by sexual difference, but is in the end inherently and unthinkingly male. Queer theorists have demonstrated that this archetypal figure is synonymous with the heterosexual body, making it normalizing rather than normal. Postcolonial and critical race theory agree that the universal body universally carries the assumption of whiteness; only colored or ethnic bodies are inscribed with difference, which thereby becomes deviation. Scholars in the emerging discipline of disability studies have argued that this particular representation of the body is ablist. Not everyone has a body conforming to the dominating somatic ideal” (Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xii).
- 22.
Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 45ff.
- 23.
Cohen, Hybridity, 1.
- 24.
Cohen, Hybridity, 1.
- 25.
Cohen, Hybridity, 2.
- 26.
For an introductory exploration of hybridity in the larger context of the “spatial turn” in Byzantine Studies , see Veikou, “Space in Text, Space as Text,” esp. 150–152.
- 27.
Cohen, Hybridity, 2.
- 28.
Cohen, Hybridity, 2.
- 29.
For the tetraktys , see also 103–105 in this volume.
- 30.
R&D 9.318–319.
- 31.
R&D 9.320, 324–325.
- 32.
R&D 9.330–331.
- 33.
R&D 9.339–341.
- 34.
Frye, Sacred Scripture, 52.
- 35.
With attention to Stacy Alaimo’s critique of the way the term “sustainability” has been co-opted by corporate and political interests and, in particular, how the proliferation of the term in the United States is “in part driven by the desire to mark the country’s resources as belonging to some groups and not others,” and thus with the potential to, among other concerns, “be fueled by anti-immigrant fervor as well as by the desire to entrench systemic inequalities during a time of economic instability” (Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sustainable That,” 558). This is part of her broader investigation into the ways in which “Western, Euro-American thought has long waged ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ against LGBTQ peoples, as well as women, people of color, the colonized, and indigenous peoples” (Alaimo, Exposed, 41).
- 36.
Following the definition in Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective,” v: “Autopoietic (self-producing) systems are autonomous units with self-defined boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable. Sympoietic (collectively-producing) systems do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change. Since they cannot be identified by boundaries, sympoietic systems must be identified by the self-organizing factors involved in their generation.” Chapter 3 of Staying with the Trouble is devoted to sympoiesis; autopoiesis is a recurring theme in Wolfe, What is Posthumanism.
- 37.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 33.
- 38.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 33.
- 39.
Beaton suggests only that the work may be the earliest of the vernacular romances, with others dating it more specifically to the second half of the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, for which, see Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 245 n.7.
- 40.
Hesseling, Achilléide Byzantine, 9.
- 41.
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 103.
- 42.
Byz.Ach 112–113, 116–119.
- 43.
Byz.Ach 151–152.
- 44.
Byz.Ach 506–508.
- 45.
Byz.Ach 533–534.
- 46.
Byz.Ach 593.
- 47.
Byz.Ach 602.
- 48.
Byz.Ach 627.
- 49.
Byz.Ach 546–557.
- 50.
Byz.Ach 562.
- 51.
For the expression of male competition through the traffic and control of women in the War of Troy and in the romance tradition more generally, see Constantinou, “Between (Wo)men.”
- 52.
Byz.Ach 1384.
- 53.
Byz.Ach 1390.
- 54.
Byz.Ach 1398.
- 55.
Byz.Ach 1401.
- 56.
Byz.Ach 1411–1413.
- 57.
Byz.Ach 1572–1573.
- 58.
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6. As with ecocriticism, Wolfe similarly connects posthumanism with previous forms of activist identity studies and post-structuralism: “what does it mean when the aspiration of human freedom, extended to all, regardless of race or class or gender, has as its material condition of possibility absolute control over the lives of nonhuman others? If our work is characterized in no small part by its duty to be socially responsive to the ‘new social movements’ (civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and so on), then how must our work itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human?” (7).
- 59.
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 8.
- 60.
As, for instance, in the subtitle of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
- 61.
Wolfe, Animal Rites, 8.
- 62.
For the distinction among various possible names, see Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 99, in which she argues that “the issues about naming […] have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity.”
- 63.
Wolfe, What is Posthumanism, xv.
- 64.
Byz.Ach 765–766.
- 65.
Byz.Ach 776.
- 66.
Byz.Ach 778.
- 67.
Byz.Ach 780.
- 68.
Byz.Ach 781.
- 69.
Byz.Ach 782.
- 70.
For a survey of golden plane trees in antiquity and in Byzantium, see Iafrate, Wandering Throne, 78–84.
- 71.
Byz.Ach 793–797, 802–808. Brett, “The Automata in the Byzantine ‘Throne of Solomon’” remains an important exploration of these devices as both a literary topos and as material objects. Truitt, Medieval Robots, 24–26, discusses the throne and its reception in the Latin West. These studies, however, have been almost entirely superceded by Allegra Iafrate’s Wandering Throne of Solomon (2016), which puts the throne in a much broader historical and geographical framework, analyzing its significance in Christian , Islamic, and Jewish cultures and also reflecting on the different ways in which various medieval cultures perceived this marvel. For the material objects, see also Niewöhner, “Zoomorphic Rainwater Spouts.” For the erotic aspects of the fountains in particular in the romances, see Nilsson, “Ancient Water in Fictional Fountains.”
- 72.
Such trees were not unknown in Byzantium; at the Great Palace, for instance, there was a “golden tree with its mechanically singing birds , which was created for the emperor Theophilos by the master of the mint in the second quarter of the ninth century” (Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 42).
- 73.
Byz.Ach 837–838, 842–846.
- 74.
Byz.Ach 865–869, 874–876.
- 75.
Such descriptions are not unique to the Byzantine romances; the origins of rhetorical strategies that compare women to nature, gardens, and animals has a long genealogy that includes, in addition to the ancient Greek novels that are the more direct source of their Byzantine descendants, texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which begins with Daphne’s transformation from girl to plant.
- 76.
Byz.Ach 1148–1156.
- 77.
Indeed, Haraway follows Anna Tsing (in “Feral Biologies”) in noting that “the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity. Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other critters” (Staying with the Trouble, 100).
- 78.
Byz.Ach 1604–1613. Like Digenis, after his hunt Achilles is careful to wash his bloodstained clothes and change into nicer, golden ones upon returning to civilization (Byz.Ach 1620ff.).
- 79.
Byz.Ach 1628–1633.
- 80.
H&H 1.4.3.
- 81.
H&H 1.5.3.
- 82.
H&H 1.5.5.
- 83.
H&H 1.5.6.
- 84.
H&H 1.5.6.
- 85.
D&C 1.83.
- 86.
D&C 1.123, 143–146. For Drosilla as hybrid, see 109 in this volume.
- 87.
D&C 1.77, 78, 80, 81.
- 88.
Haraway , When Species Meet, 19.
- 89.
Haraway , Companion Species Manifesto, 4.
- 90.
Haraway , Companion Species Manifesto, 5. And again shortly thereafter: “I risk alienating my old doppelganger, the cyborg , in order to try to convince readers that dogs might be better guides through the thickets of technobiopolitics in the Third Millennium of the Current Era” (4).
- 91.
Haraway , Companion Species Manifesto, 4.
- 92.
For automata in Byzantium, see Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 42–45. For a wonderfully illustrated diachronic and transnational history of such creations, see Chapuis and Droz, Automata . For an introduction to automata in the Arabic sources, see Zielinski and Weibel, Allah’s Automata.
- 93.
For a brief history of automata from antiquity to the Middle Ages, see Truitt, Medieval Robots, 2–7 and for some methodological comments on the difference between understanding automata in fictional and non-fictional texts, see 6–7: “Imaginary or legendary automata that appear in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts reveal as much about medieval attitudes to natural knowledge as the actual objects that were created to enliven courtly pageantry or to adorn monumental clocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” (6).
- 94.
A critique of Descartes was foundational to the animal rights movement; Peter Singer’s deconstruction of Descartes’ philosophy on animals, which Singer calls “the absolute nadir” and “the last, most bizarre, and—for the animals—most painful outcome of Christian doctrine” in Animal Liberation, was central to the philosophical revision of human conceptions of animals (200).
- 95.
Indeed, just as previous hybrid forms and animal automata expose the artificial divide between human and non-human animal, between plant and animal, between organic and inorganic matter; just as Digenis, both Christian and Muslim, both enforces and complicates the separateness of these identities in the liminal space in which he resides; so too do other technological interventions “problematize the boundary between the living and the dead,” suggesting the necessity of technology for a sustainable posthuman futurity. As E.R. Truitt demonstrates, androids and automata “are frequently found at gravesites, mausoleums, and memorials in medieval literature. […] Memorial automata often look human, and they can be eerily lifelike copies of individuals.” From this, she suggests that “automata, as lifelike proxies for individuals, call identity into question. Is a perfect copy of someone the same as the exemplar? Second, sepulchral automata interrogate what makes a living body.” Truitt’s primary example of this is drawn from the Roman de Troie and its sources and analogues, notably Guido delle Colonne and John Lydgate (the Greek War of Troy is omitted from this discussion): after removing Hector’s internal organs, tubes are placed through his nose (in Benoît and Lydgate ) or the top of his head is cut off (Guido) so that an embalming liquid can flow through his body. In his description, “Guido repeats the phrase ‘as though alive’ [quasi viuum] four times and the word ‘falsely’ [ficticie] twice in his description of this artificial marvel. Hector is lifelike in appearance, but he is not alive,” thus complicating the dividing line between life and death. The Greek version, however, refuses to engage in such existentialism; whereas “the preparation of Hector’s corpse, the construction of his tomb, and his funeral unfold over three hundred and fifty-five lines” in the Roman de Troie , the Greek passage comes in at ninety lines (WoT 7286–7376). The Greek translator, moreover, does not seem to fully grasp the mechanics of the embalming machine:
Εἰς τὸ κιβούριον τὸ φρικτὸν ἐκεῖνο τὸ μεγάλον
τὸ θρονίν του εθέσασιν, ἐπάνω τὸν ἐκάτσαν.
Δύο βατσέλια εὐγενικά, τὰ λέγουσιν λεκάνες,
ἐβάλαν, ἐγεμίσασι βαλσαμόλαιον ἔσω
μετὰ σμύρνας εὐγενικῆς καὶ ἀλόης ὡσαύτος.
Ἐκεῖ τὰ ἐκαθίσασιν ἔσω τοῦ κιβουρίου.
τοὺς δύο πόδας ἔβαλαν ἔσω τῶν βατσελίων.
ἀπάνω ἐχωνόντησαν, λέγω, τῶν ἀστραγγάλων.
Δύω χρυσοὺς ἐβάλασι κεράμους ἐμνοστάτους.
ἀπὸ τὴν μύτην τὸν σκεποῦν ἕως τοὺς ἀστραγγάλους.
ούκ ἄφηναν τὴν μυρωδίαν ἔξω διὰ νὰ ὑπαγαίνῃ,
ἀλλ’ ἔσωθεν εἰς τὸ κορμὶν ἐχώνευεν ἀπέσω.
On that marvelous and great ciborium
they set his throne, and sat him on top.
Two elegant vatselia, by which they mean basins,
they made, filling the inside with balsam oil,
with fragrant myrrh and even aloe.
These they placed inside the ciborium.
They put his two feet in the basins;
they submerged him, I say, up to his ankles.
They made two fragrant golden ceramic tiles
that poured the substance down from his nose to his ankles;
but the fragrant substance did not stay on the outside as it went down,
but flowed inside his body from the outside. (WoT 7314–7325)
The Greek passage not only abbreviates the scene as a whole, the level of detail about the machine itself, and the interpretive commentary that runs alongside the passages in Guido, Lydgate , and Benoît, it seems as if the author does not himself understand or wonders if his audience won’t understand the machine either; he glosses the loan-word βατσέλια, from the Italian vascèllo, substituting it for a more familiar word for basins, λεκάνες.
- 96.
Haraway , Companion Species Manifesto, 4. For a more detailed definition of her use of the term companion species, see Haraway , When Species Meet, 15–19.
- 97.
Littlewood, “Romantic Paradises,” 100.
- 98.
Littlewood, “Romantic Paradises,” 99. The claim has been taken up more recently by Ingela Nilsson: “The garden may also represent or reflect the female body: the most beautiful, and yet the most dangers. Pleasure can be pure and chaste, but it can also be dangerous and sinful” (“To Touch or Not to Touch,” 242).
- 99.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 2.
- 100.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 40. The citation is from Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures: Latour, Bruno. “Facing Gaïa: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature.” Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, February 18–28, 2013.
- 101.
Haraway , Staying with the Trouble, 40.
- 102.
Steel, How to Make a Human, 233.
- 103.
Illimitable Men, “The Red Pill Constitution.”
- 104.
Lomuto , “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies.”
- 105.
Galbi, “Achilles in Women’s Clothing: Tzetzes’s Allegorical Interpretation.” Galbi uses Tzetzes in service of men’s rights activism again in another blog post entitled “Homer Effaced Palamedes to Heroize Word-Twisting Odysseus,” in which he argues that: “Palamedes attempted to live as a man of integrity within dominant gynocentric ideology. When Helen and Paris illicitly fled from her husband to Troy , Palamedes supported the oath of Helen’s suitors to defend her husband’s marital rights. Odysseus took a more critical position. He refused to engage in violence against men over issues centering on women.”
- 106.
- 107.
Alaimo, Exposed, 2.
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Goldwyn, A.J. (2018). Byzantine Posthumanism: Autopoiesis, Sympoiesis, and Making Kin in the Gardens of Romance. In: Byzantine Ecocriticism. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_5
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