A brief reflection on relics, practice in presence.

There are many instances of swearing on Saint’s relics in La Mort le Roi Artu. I mention a few here, mostly for my own recall:

The people of Joieuse Garde swear on saint’s relics to stand by Lancelot to the death
Arthur requires that his men swear on relics that they will go with him to siege the Castle of Joieuse Garde
Lancelot says that he will swear on relics that he will go barefoot into exile for as many as 10 years to avoid combat with Gwain

etc.

It was a scene in the Le Chevalier de la Charrette, however, in which Lancelot and Méléagant swear on relics as the initiation of the process to resolve the accusation that Kay has indeed had intimate relations with Guinevere that encouraged me to ask questions about what was behind or in these relics that is not in words. This scene is witty in large part because it is Lancelot, swearing on Kay’s behalf and defense, who is guilty. This passage clearly marks that God and the name of God, as well as the relics, are important in resolving this dispute. In naming both separately, however, the difference between swearing in word and in name and swearing in the presence of physical objects is also very present.

Yesterday I read an older article by Catherine Brown on what are arguably a different sort of relics (“The Relics of Menéndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies,” La corónica 24.1, 1995). This is a fascinating article, maybe not as much about Menéndez Pidal as one would think, that elucidated the Charrette relic scene and also the idea of presence (Gumbrecht, Production of Presence). Early on the line between text and relic begins to grow cloudy. In preparing to comment a passage from the Estoria de sancto Toribio de Astorga, Brown writes the following:

Relics, texts, and stories go together. As we have seen, in order to mean (as) “relics,” objects must be authenticated by text and tradition: as any reader of medieval hagiography knows, relics generate stories. One of the greatest relic-disseminators of the Penninsular Middle Ages was St. Toribius of Astorga, whose arca sacta is a dizzying mise-en-abyme of reliquary fiction. The arca is a box containing boxes, a relic container containing relics, and the Estoria de sancto Toribio de Astorga that preserves its memory, a text containing texts, a story containing stories. This textual object is as much caja china as arca sancta… (21).

Relics may mean as relics because they are authenticated by narratives and tradition, but if a relic isn’t present, in a place, at the time of a battle as in the Charrette example, neither can the narrative be evoked. In the way in which I am using relic, as physical objects, things (hair, thorns, blood, teeth, etc.) I intend to separate relic from text because if relics were only things by which we can access text or narrative, why wouldn’t a text, apart from questions of literacy, which are certainly legitimate, be read aloud in times requiring the active memory, or production of presence of the saints? It thus appears that either texts are insufficient for some cases necessitating or desirous of “relics” or, on the other hand, that relics are capable of communicating something beyond text. This is certainly not to say that a book or letter cannot be a relic; I would argue, however, that the book would be relic because of a period of close contact or ownership by a saint, for example, and also because of its physical presence: its weight in the arms of the bearer and the smell of its pages.

I permit myself a few more reflections on the question of presence. I am unsatisfied with my readings on presence, mostly in that I have yet to understand how we might communicate the effects of presence without simply stating that they are there. I still suspect that any attempt to do more than mention the effects will require the same type of hermeneutic analysis that we have always done and in effect, destroy the effects. To communicate the effects of the presence of a particular object at a given moment, such as a richly illuminated manuscript or a relic, wouldn't we have to carry them around all day? Even with this substantial effort to constantly be contemporary in our articulation of the effects of presence, wouldn’t we have to admit that these effects are the product of a particular time and conditioned by the experiences of the observers?

In the case of the Charrette, we do not know what the relics look like, of what they consist and of which stories, if any, they remind the people who insist that they be brought to the battle. We know only that they are present and as presented in the Charrette, they are storyless, without history or genealogy. They appear in conjunction with a verbal swearing, presumably completing a role that the speech alone does not, unless they act simply as redundant elements.