M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural flowering and it was a time when the newly conscious nations of Europe, including England, were hungry for documents establishing their ancient heritage and, thus, legitimacy. Every nation wanted its Homer. The trade in forged religious relics had died with the Reformation, but a vigorous trade in national and literary relics took its place, and it is likely that the libraries of the gentry, whence the contents of the emptied-out monasteries landed, would also have been full of fabrications — many of them created by out-of-work former monks and scribes.

The Beowulf manuscript in the British Library is the sole source for the supposed Dark-Age story that everyone reads in English Lit, and its provenance can only be dated with any surety to right around 1700, the first time it actually is mentioned as part of the Cotton Library collection. The fire-damaged manuscript however bears the signature of a well-connected 16th-century Anglo-Saxonist Laurence Lowell, and is generally assumed to have passed through his hands sometime in the mid-1500s. If Lowell didn’t actually have a hand in creating the document, he may have acquired it via his employer, Sir William Cecil, when Lowell worked in his household tutoring Cecil’s ward, the young Edward de Vere (the later-famous Earl of Oxford, who in my view is the best candidate for the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays).

Not unconnected to certain players in the story of the Beowulf forgery (if it is that) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, also known as Bishop Ussher. He knew Cotton and used his library for his own research, and he also famously dated the creation of the world to 4004 BC, providing fuel for centuries of Creationist absurdity about the young age of the world. He’s the one who said that fossils were put in the rock to test our faith. It is really in the sphere of literature and history that we ought to be “creationists.” Documents may well be younger than they seem, essentially cultural fossils placed in the rock, made new to look old. More and more, despite initial misgivings, I am excited by the possibility that Beowulf is a far younger creation than anybody ever realized.

One of the reasons I always loved Beowulf and tried to get friends to actually read it is that aspects of it feel so weirdly modern. It has such wonderful aspects of sci-fi horror, for example: a resentful outcast monster lurking outside the light of the cheerful halls, preying on people at night, part of a race of creatures who have acid for blood. There’s a battle at the bottom of a lake. How cool is that? It doesn’t exactly feel like mythology, but like a novel. And then there’s the final dark episode with the dragon, which is totally classic. It’s a really dark and cool story, full of twists and turns and beautiful imagery of a misty, ancient Northern kingdom. This is why, despite Woody Allen’s quip that you should never take a class where they make you read Beowulf, readers are often drawn to the story and keep trying to make (invariably terrible) film versions of it.

The “acid for blood” thing has always stood out in my mind as particularly anachronistic for a story supposedly written down somewhere on either side of the year 1,000 and based on older oral tradition. Consider how vividly the poet describes it (this is from Seamus Heaney’s translation):

Meanwhile the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts …
its blade had melted
and the scrollwork on it burned, so scalding was the blood
of the poisonous fiend who had perished there.

Alien, anyone? I’m not a chemist, but this sounds like a description of nitric or sulfuric acid’s affect on iron. Those acids were discovered by the Arab alchemist Geber in the 8th century, though were not industrially produced and widely used in Britain until, well, the 16th century. I have a hard time imagining a Dark-Age Anglo-Saxon scop (poet) or even a 10th or 11th century scribe writing such a description. What kind of experience would someone in Britain at that time have with highly corrosive acids? I don’t think a writer necessarily needs to have seen or heard about a thing to be able to imagine it, but this is an awfully singular image that strikes me as out of place before the Renaissance. (I’d welcome hearing a dissenting view on that from someone more acquainted with the history of chemistry/industry.)

Even more anachronistic, to my mind, is the covert theme of Beowulf, which is melancholia. I’ve always felt that the Beowulf-poet was not just some bard reciting one of the favorite legends of his people, but an original creator of a poetic work about the sickness of his own soul. The monster that terrorizes the previously cheerful hall of Heorot reads like a model of clinical depression: He is an exile, condemned to lurk beyond the reach of the light spilling from the hall of men, forced to listen in bitterness to the sound of their harps, the clink of cups, and their laughter. Unable to join them because of his original guilt (he is one of the “sons of Cain”), he lives instead with his mother at the bottom of a murky, monster-filled lake.

Anyone who has suffered depression would recognize these images and identify with Grendel’s alienation from the cheerful happy people, the stocky, manly Beowulves of this world (and perhaps would even identify with the Freudian/Hitchcockian theme of unresolved bitter and dependent feelings toward a similarly alienated mother). Grendel is a brilliant portrait of the bitter self-exile of the depressed person. By contrast, Beowulf himself is nothing more than a comic-book caricature, a frat guy cum uber-hero. In describing this contrast between the noble hall of the cheerful heroes and the alienation of the monster, the Beowulf poet was describing his own painful alienation from his fellows. The poem was a poetic expression of that melancholy loneliness.

People have always experienced introverted sadness, but just as “clinical depression” is a cultural construct of our age, melancholia was a cultural construct of the Renaissance. It was in the 15th Century that this kind of socially alienated introversion began to be romanticized and explored as an aspect of genius by writers and philosophers and playwrights. To my knowledge, you don’t get sensitive, sympathetic portrayals of melancholics before this period; and while Grendel is not exactly a sympathetic portrayal, there is definitely something sad about him and his life. It is hard not to feel his pain as he runs off, sans arm, to die at home with his mother. It is this sympathetic aspect of his character that makes Grendel seem so modern, and so inviting to modern reimagining by writers like John Gardner.

There is the whole notion that J.R.R. Tolkien, entranced by the mysteries of Beowulf and its ancient idiom, wrote The Lord of the Rings to flesh out the ancient mythological world of the Anglo Saxons and, in the process, create a uniquely English myth. What if he wasn’t original? What if, in fact, that’s what the original 16th-century writer of Beowulf was himself doing? I’m reminded of the quote by Hegel: The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries for the Egyptians themselves. There is an occult recursion in history, if you look carefully, and Tolkien’s relation to Beowulf seems like an example of that process.

Some of the pleasure of the “Beowulf-as-forgery” idea is admittedly simply the thrill of conspiracy, an unsolved mystery. (Finding out the truth will require carbon-dating the manuscript–perhaps after Harper and his friends gain sufficient legitimacy for their theory that the British Library could be persuaded to perform the necessary tests on this British national treasure.) But I also find that it actually adds to my pleasure in the text to read it through the lens of its being a possible product of the age of Shakespeare or Milton. I actually think it adds to the genius of the work to see its mysteries as being part of an atmosphere of pastness created imaginatively by a Renaissance writer, rather than simply a more or less faithful recording of a Dark Age legend.

I was trying to explain to E. why I’m obsessed with the Alien films, and the art of H.R. Giger. To someone unobsessed with horror, it must seem silly. So I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Alien, and the meaning of the alien, and why I love those films so much.

The alien is Slavoj Zizek’s favorite symbol of jouissance, the Lacanian notion of pleasure-in-pain that is sort of the secret satanic lifeblood of the world, and which erupts where the world has become wounded through some trauma. Zizek’s approach is good, in principle, but he’s notoriously careless, and what he actually says about the movie suggests he never actually saw it or was drunk when he did. He describes the face-hugger as a “disgusting polyp,” for one thing. Odd word choice. But I do think it is worthwhile to push the joy-in-pain idea. What is the “trauma” that gives rise to the alien? What is its relevance to the “real world” outside the film, especially now, almost three decades later?

The gender politics of the Alien films, especially the first one, are clear enough: Ripley is a career woman. If you remove the terrifying intrusive presence (Zizek’s excellent methodology for interpreting any horror film), you are left, in this case, with a modern workplace of the late 1970s, where women have made their way into the next-to-top-most echelons (as Ripley has) but still find their authority precarious.

The setting of Alien is significant. From the very first shots, the Nostromo is presented as an office, with its corridors, its papers, its little human touches (the glass drinking bird). Kane, the first to awaken from cryosleep, is like the office manager, groggily opening up, putting on the pot of coffee for his coworkers, etc. Dallas is in charge — a jaded but competent and sensitive boss. Ripley is the second in command: a young, cold, ambitious career woman who has risen to upper management and seems to eschew traditional female roles. The men in the film disobey her, call her a bitch, and one (who turns out to be an android) even tries to kill her with a rolled up pornographic magazine.

In the 1970s, women like Ripley began to face tradeoffs between their traditional female roles (reproduction, femininity, beauty) and their new desexualized professional identities where they struggled to have a voice and be heard as equals, to be taken seriously and listened to. Men didn’t really like it. This was the world in which behaviors like “sexual harassment” were coming to be conceived and named as transgressions. We are still very much with and in the legacy of this change, and its repressed underside is every bit as alive and unspeakable.

In other words, no longer acknowledged within the workplace the Nostromo mirrors is the subject of sexual difference. This includes not just overt attraction or romantic behavior between sexes, touching, sexual humor, etc., but also just the noticing/acknowledgment of our different bodies. Men and women notice each other as sex objects, not just as coworkers, even if we are prevented from talking about it openly. What was driven underground with women’s traditionally feminine concerns and roles (such as childbearing, still a notoriously taboo subject in the workplace) was male sexual desire, which used to find expression at work as much as in any other context. A generation of male professionals has now fully internalized a public decorum that does not acknowledge the male sexual gaze, or reserves it for safe (male only) company. (Women half know this and half don’t know it, which is one of the interesting and electric things about offices.)

When the cryosleep cocoons open up at the beginning of Alien, revealing a mostly naked crew rendered equal/desexualized in this technical future, what male viewer is not inspecting the scene for a glimpse of a woman’s breasts — breasts which, we know or suspect, may be bare in this clinical and asexual context? The camera’s strictly neutral view (centrally positioned squarely opposite the empty “place” of a computer control console) is subtly charged with this disavowed desire — the same way that sexual interest in one’s colleagues, and interest in one’s colleagues’ sex, is disavowed in the ostensibly “neutral” context of work.

I think this disavowed desire that charges an ostensibly or overtly neutral office space provides the true “hidden meaning” of the film.

It is not enough to talk about Ripley as a new feminine heroine, a role model for “strong and independent” women in the modern world, and about the alien as a loathsome, hypermasculine (impregnating, oral-phallic) presence. Sure, its head is a giant penis, but it’s not that simple. The alien is an eruption of what is unspeakable (literally unspeakable, because potentially illegal) within the new gender-equal, sex-neutralized workplace: physical desire, sexual embodiment as such, and the truth of sexual attractions/reproductive urges that can now be expressed only under the table, if at all. The alien (whose fascination comes partly from its blindness — a classical symbol of the impartial or neutral Law) gives physical form to what we have all, on both sides of the sexual gap, cut away from ourselves, sacrificed, in pain, for the sake of the new capitalist order.

Thus the reading that only sees Ripley as a hero and the alien as the enemy is blind to this sexual gap and to the male gaze altogether, which retains a wish to regard the female center of this film as an object of sexual desire — a gaze that, in this film, finds itself perpetually thwarted/obscured (just as Ripley’s voice is, throughout the film, not heard by her male colleagues — the film’s logline, don’t forget, was “In space, no one can hear you scream”). Among many other things, the alien represents the potential fulfillment of such a wish. And insofar as women in this new world have “given up their femininity,” they too have lost something; Ripley, alone with her cat in the shuttle at the end, represents a terrifying possibility for the desexualized career woman as much as a victory blow for her independence. I suspect that, besides obviously being a fearful antagonist, the alien is as much an object of female repressed (sexual and maternal) desire to be “treated like a woman” in the old fashioned way. Isn’t it only the alien, of all the characters in the film, who can be said to treat us like a woman?

The alien is terrifying, but we want to see it, because it is so incredibly beautiful. The intense, almost unspeakable beauty of H.R. Giger’s creation is what is so hard to notice behind the veil of genre (horror) that is drawn over the film. We turn our eyes away from gore as such, from the insides of the body revealed, and from the chest-burster rising from the bloody pool of Kane’s chest. But afterward we yearn to see what this “star child” has become, what it has grown into, how it has turned out, and the film never quite satisfies us. In a way (though it is also partly an effect of the time when the film was made, before CGI, when monsters weren’t all that scary-looking because they were just men in suits), the beauty of the alien “hides” behind the horror-film truism that what you can’t see is more frightening than what you can see. But our longing to see the full-grown alien, to drink in its gorgeous form, is as nonobvious, and as difficult to admit perhaps, as the male longing to see some breasts in the cryosleep room at the beginning of the film (or perhaps an even more intimate glimpse in the shuttle closet at the end). I can’t speak for ‘the female gaze’ but is it any different? Does it not thrill to the beauty of the xenomorph in its disavowed nostalgia for (a bit of good old) ‘sexual harassment’?

The term “jouissance” is pretentious and vague. I submit that the alien is simply sex, in all its tacit dimensions that we, after feminism, have lost the will and the capacity and the freedom to acknowledge. It is the difference and vibrancy (and danger) that was drained from the gender-egalitarian workplace for it to function as a place of work. The alien is what has fled into the cooling ducts, biding its time, as we men and women sit at our computer consoles, in our neutralized offices, pretending for eight or nine hours each day that our differences aren’t the most exciting thing in the world.