24
so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new
object, obtained by the sliding and overturning of former categories. That
object is the Text” (Barthes 905). Beowulf\s actually a particularly apt
work to “play” with since the text is far from fixed. Barthes notes that
while the “work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space
of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field”
(905). In a similar way, Beowulf is far from being a single coherent work.
Instead, its very nature is that of multiplicity. Though the text as we have
it was possibly composed by a single author, the extant manuscript is
written in the hands of two different scribes who mix West Saxon and
Anglian dialects. As Barthes notes, “the work can be held in the hand,
the Text is held in language, [it] only exists in the movement of a
discourse . . . [and] cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its
constitutive movement is that of cutting across the work, several works”
(905). For modem readers, this disparate Old English language must be
translated, which is always a destabilizing enterprise.*
In other words, the Text of Beowulf by its own internal
linguistic contradictions and variations, disproves the notion of language
as something fixed. Parts of the Beowulf manuscript are unreadable,
which has led scholars to “fill in” segments of the poem; the
interpretation of the poem’s meaning, even by the most astute scholars of
its (known) historical context, must always be from a modem
perspective,’ but layered within any new interpretation are shades of
older readings of the poem. As Barthes argues, “the Text is plural. . . not
a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it
answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a
dissemination.” So many writers, readers, and artists have engaged with
the poem since the 19* century, when it was translated into modem
languages and published widely'® that “it cannot be contained in a
hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What eonstitutes the Text
is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old
classifications” (905). Engaging with a Text in this way is a hallmark of
fan critiques and revisions.
The work, the manuscript of Beowulf, is a real document that
“can be held in the hand.” Since Oldham cannot re- w&