"So That We May Speak of Them": Enjoying the Middle Ages

Abstract

This essay explores the significance of enjoyment to medieval studies, and to some of the discontents of contemporary literary and cultural studies more generally.1 What, to begin with, is the nature of the signifying field in which medievalist historiography, as a mode of sublimation, takes place? I use the term sublimation to refer to the problem addressed by Freud of how the creation of art and other forms of cultural achievement may be understood in relation to desire.2 The movie Babe will help us to an initial sketch of what is at stake in the relation of the signifier to desire and memory. Babe is, first of all, a film with a recognizably medievalist agenda. It celebrates love between master and servant (these days, animals have to stand in for the peasants), and rural life as the scene in which such love might be rediscovered. It expresses distaste for technology, focused especially on communications in the form of a Fax machine, but also recuperates the Fax, as well as discipline, training, technique. These figures recall the master tropes of anti-utilitarian medievalism in the nineteenth century.3 So does the film's insistent association of meaning less speech with commercialism and disbelief in the remarkable, and its association of meaningful speech with Babe's taciturn but loving farmer? a man behind the times who nonetheless is able to succeed because he