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The Middle English Pearl:Figuring the Unfigurable J. Allan Mitchell In her 1968 British Academy lecture, Elizabeth Salter announced that the Middle English Pearl invites a criticism which applies "the typological or figural method," one that works toward discovering in the text a historiography of "promise and fulfilment, most completely described and illustrated by the Scriptures, but discernible as a constant rhythm in every part of Christian experience, past, present, and to come."1 But Salter's lecture was not the occasion for launching a large scale typological analysis, but rather a call for others to start thinking of Pearl differently, in line with the aesthetic demands of figuralism. Salter was thereby showing a way out of the notorious "elegy versus allegory" debates which had dominated critical reflection on Pearl for the first half of our century. The new critical orientation Salter proposed steered a course between, on the one hand, the historicism and autobiographicalism of the elegy hypothesis and, on the other hand, the reductive abstractions of allegory, while partaking of the insights of both approaches to the text's meaning: figuralism should direct us accordingly toward an apprehension of spiritual and eternal truths incarnate in concrete, historical facts. For many earlier commentators, however, Pearl in the defining instance had either a concrete historical referent (namely, the poet's own or perhaps his patron's dead daughter, whom the poem supposedly commemorates) or certain symbolic or metaphysical referents (for example, the pearl-maiden stands for virginity or the transformed soul).2 Early twentieth-century criticism was thus broadly polarized between an excavative criticism, centered on recovering the original historical conditions of the text's composition, and an exegetical criticism that was directed solely toward expounding Christian doctrine. Out of the context of this critical stalemate, Salter attempted a kind of harmonization of the elegy-allegory theories, what amounts to an ideal rapprochement of the two determinations of genre by way of Erich Auerbach's distinguished discussion of typology. But the question needs to be asked, is a typological reading of Pearl finally defensible? [End Page 86] Auerbach has shown that figuralism has been an important component of Christian rhetoric from the beginning.3 Typology subsequently established itself in Christian literary history as a dominant procedure for interpreting texts and human experience, and, if Salter is correct, figura will be particularly relevant to our understanding of Pearl. Salter cites Auerbach's seminal words on the nature of figural poetics: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming.4 The typological text or, as the case may be, the figural interpretation, does not replace or transcend historical events or persons, but completes and consummates them. Correspondingly, it can be said that typology does not finally occlude or jettison the literal sense, but that it redeems and extends the letter to discover its actual spiritual import. What is significant about the figural approach to reality, then, is its unique emphasis on the "historicity both of the sign and what it signifies."5 In other words, the figural utterance is always rooted firmly in history and undergoes redefinition in time. Such is the kind of process Salter sees at work in Pearl when she observes that "the central power of the poem draws upon essentially figural concepts: upon an acceptance of reality of an earthly relationship between dreamer and Pearl maiden, which is not rejected but fulfilled in spiritual terms. . . . The vision does not deny the earlier existence [of the pearl as human daughter]—it simply completes it. So the poem deals much in...
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