Out of Mind, Out of Sight

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THE ROUND TABLE1Ol 10 Participants at the Round Table expressed some concern at what they saw as a dearth of analytic discourses (with the exception ofpsychoanalytic ones) on the subject ofpleasure. I disagree, as Nicola MacDonald's impressive bibliography makes clear. I list only a few (non-psychoanalytic) examples: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure ofthe Text, trans. R. Miller (Oxford and New York: Oxford Universiry Press, 1990); Janice Radway, Reading Romance: Women, Patriarchy, andPopular Literature (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique ofTaste, trans. R. Nice (Boston: Harvard University Press, repr. 1990; 2002). There are hosts of similar examples to be found in feminist theory, semiotics, and cultural studies. Out of Mind, Out of Sight LAURIE A. FINKE and MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN There is an interesting slippage in the call for papers for this roundtable that ought to give us pause. It begins in the title, with 'Cloaks of Invisibility.' One of the thirteen treasures of the Island of Britain, recounted in Rachel Bromwich's Welsh Triads, is KingArthur's cloak that enables its wearer to become invisible while still seeing everything around him: 'whoever was under it could not be seen, and he could see everyone.' This cloak is a sign ofthe wearer's status; it will notwork for the unworthy. Since only a king (in this caseArthur) or the champion ofa king can wield it, it is ultimately a sign ofhis sovereignty (and, ofcourse, ofhis masculinity, as the pronoun was meant to suggest; the triads list another cloak that renders visible what is usually invisible; to wit, a woman's virginity, but that is another essay).zArthur's mantle offers itswearer extraordinary powers ofsurveillance; to be able to seewithout being seen is the hallmark of Foucault's panopticon, the model of contemporary biopower. If there is an analogue in our profession (literary studies) to this power conferred by the cloak it lies in the claims to scientific objectivity and tationality that render the investigator (in our case the academic reader/critic) invisible and that are the cornerstone of the modern university. These claims were staked out for literary studies at the turn of the twentieth century largely by medievalists like John M. Manley, R.K. Root, George Lyman Kittredge, J.S.P. Tatlock (himselfan Arthurian), and others at a timewhen thevanguard ofthe profession was represented by German-trained philologists promoting the systematic and scientific study of medieval texts.3 The 'scientific' approach to literary studies required strategies of invisibility by which literary scholars could limit the proliferation, circulation, and meaning ofthe texts they were studying by attributing to the author readings that were their own. This is the sort ofinvisibility that Sealy Gilles and Sylvia Tomasch describe in Manly and Rickert's painstaking editorial procedure for their edition of The Canterbury Tales. The edition, based on 'scientific principles,' was supposed to 'discover' without editorial intervention the authentic text and the authentic poet, but managed by this sleight of hand to invent the American Chaucer, 'the 102ARTHURIANA middle class poet ofdemocratic values.4 This is the sort of invisibility that we all by and large take for granted every time we invoke an author's name to ratify our own assertions. Yet the call for papers invokes the trope ofinvisibility as a sign not ofour (that is Aurthurians') power but ofour powerlessness: 'To what extent,' it asks, 'areArthurian texts and scholars marginalized (or self-marginalizing), not only within the larger domain of medieval studies, but within the domain ofliterary studies?' We are to understand from this that out cloaks of invisibility disable rathet than enable us; they render us marginalized, that is powerless, irrelevant, unread, unremarked, uncited, trivial, neglected, ignored, disregarded, and overlooked. This kind of invisibility strikes us as rather more like what we encounter in the first season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 'Out ofMind, Out ofSight,' in which a perpetually ignored high school student named Marcie has been rendered literally invisible by her classmates' neglect and proceeds to use her invisibility to get revenge for their slights. To some extent such complaints of neglect are a standard feature of our professional rhetoric. What field does not consider its contributions to...