Enclosing the natural world: knowledge and writing

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The beginning of knowledge is the observation of how things are; the beginning of law, the observation of how things ought to be. The power of the riddler is to describe the miraculous and to enclose the limitless by signifying words. In previous chapters, I have described the power that the natural world has to confine and define human beings, groups and concepts in Old English poetry. In this chapter I take a different perspective and, to a certain extent, reverse the argument. Where the previous chapters have described the natural world as a force in opposition to human constructions (‘humanity’, ‘society’ etc.), this chapter focuses on the fact that the representation of the natural world itself is a poetic construction. The literature in which definitions of human beings, groups and concepts take place thus enacts a process opposite to the one that it describes: as Old English poets write about human beings who are encircled, confined and defined by the hostile forces of the natural world, they enclose the natural world in their representations of it and confine it to the roles that they desire for it – roles like, for example, defining the ineffable power of God. The posture of helplessness before the power of the natural world, too, is a creation of Old English poets, for they manipulate the representation of the natural world and make it what they want it to be.