Like a Flower Whose Calyx Emits the Astringent Perfume of Irony: The Tragic Time of Beowulf

Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

[chapter contribution to John M. Hill, ed., Thinking About the Aesthetic and Old English Poetry]

ABSTRACT:

In his consideration of the German trauerspiel [mourning song] and tragedy, Walter Benjamin wrote that “the tragic marks out a frontier of the realm of art at least as much as of the terrain of history.” Historical time, Benjamin wrote,

is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment. This means we cannot conceive of a single empirical event that bears a necessary relation to the time of its occurrence. . . . The event does not fulfill the formal nature of the time in which it takes place. For we should not think of time as merely the measure that records the duration of a mechanical change. Although such time is indeed a relatively empty form, to think of its being filled makes no sense. . . . in short, without defining how it differs from mechanical time—we may assert that the determining force of historical time cannot be fully grasped by, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process.[1]

In tragic heroic narrative, on the other hand, the “fateful climax” of the hero’s death “fulfills” time, yet the hero also dies of an “ironic immortality,” because “no one can live in fulfilled time,” and also because the death itself is “ironic from an excess of determinancy.” Further, in the same fashion, “the meaning of the fulfilled time of a tragic fate emerges in the great moments of passivity: in the tragic decision, the retarding point of the action, and in the catastrophe,” such that “tragic time bursts open, so to speak, like a flower whose calyx emits the astringent perfume of irony.”[2]

It will be the concern of this paper to delineate what I believe are the very purposefully articulated grammars and structures of nonlinear temporalities in Beowulf (especially with regard to Beowulf’s recounting of the Swedish-Geatish conflicts and the events of Ravenswood just before entering the cave of the dragon)—nonlinear temporalities that, I will argue, construct a beautiful aesthetic of what Benjamin terms an “excess of determinancy,” and thereby also construct the ironically tragic “time” of the poem.  It is my larger aim to posit the poem as a site of multiple dialectical tensions between the time of art and of history, and to argue that the poem’s historicism—whatever that might mean—only comes into view posthumously when we, its modern interpreters, grasp the “constellation” (always an intensely aesthetic arrangement between works of art as objects among other objects)[3] which our own era has formed with the earlier one of the Anglo-Saxon period within which this poem was set down in writing.[4] Ultimately, following the thought of Gerhard Richter on the painting of Anselm Kiefer, this paper will explore the ways in which Beowulf, as an artwork, “presents itself in the strange figure of a singularity that meets in unforeseeable ways with the generality of its historical and philosophical structure.”[5]