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Ruins in the Realm of Thoughts:Reading as Constellation in Anglo-Saxon Poetry Renée R. Trilling Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. -Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History Wrætlic is þes wealstan- wyrde gebræcon,burgstede burston; brosnað enta geweorc.1 -The Ruin The historicity of medieval texts and their afterlives in the modern period has been a key element of modern Anglo-Saxon scholarship, and many scholars, such as Pauline Head, assert "the unavoidable value of subjective reading" for the modern reader approaching a medieval text.2 This should hardly come as a surprise, even to medievalists; most of the literature we deem worthy of the name receives that attention precisely because it presents itself as endlessly re-readable, always subject to new interpretation. If this observation sounds irredeemably postmodern, it is worth noting that the German Romantics made the same claims about poetry more than two hundred years ago. In the age of the Enlightenment, art revealed its ineffability through criticism's best attempts to define the category of the aesthetic; in the wake of poststructuralism and Marxist historicism, [End Page 141] by contrast, such totalization is anathema. In both contexts, however, the notion of the work of art derives precisely from what is unrepresentable about it. In the eighteenth century, this ineffability was defined as moral truth, and it grounded the work of literary criticism. In the mid-twentieth century, by contrast, ineffability became indeterminability, and truth was surrendered to the play of the text. While both kinds of analysis can tell us a great deal about how texts work, neither an idealist Kantian aesthetics nor a radically affirmative postmodern skepticism offers a way to deal with the problem of history. Medievalists cannot forget about history; its material reality is ever-present in the crumbling pages of our manuscripts and in the marginal traces left by scribes, readers, and previous scholarship. As Hans Robert Jauss has written, "A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence."3 And while literary studies in recent decades has faced no shortage of historicism, the recent turn toward new formalism raises a set of unique challenges for medievalists: how to balance our aesthetic and historical impulses.4 What medievalists need, and what Jauss offers, is a methodology that affirms both the aesthetic character of the literary work and its passage through human history. Yet fifty years before Jauss tried to solve this problem through the marriage of Marxist historicism and Russian Formalism, Walter Benjamin had already found a similar way to articulate the aesthetic character of the work of art in its historical contingency, and two of his major critical concepts-the constellation and the ruin-may prove to be equally fertile ground for medievalists.5 [End Page 142] In a constellation, the image takes its shape from the relative position of the stars that form it from the perspective of the stargazer; its meaning derives from the position of the stargazer who sees the pattern and names it, often drawing on traditional narratives to do so. Hence the familiar patterns of Orion and Andromeda in the night sky, held together by gravitational forces but made meaningful through interpretation. In the critical constellation that Benjamin describes, concepts, rather than stars, appear to the critic in such a way that their relative arrangement is suddenly perceived as meaningful and becomes an image, or idea. Developing a predominantly visual and even spatial metaphor for the critical process opens up a number of intellectual possibilities. For example, the constellation's engagement with concepts is not linear; it allows...
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